Julian Maclaren-Ross collectors will want to buy The Cost of Letters: A Survey of Literary Living Standards (1998), published by Waterstone's Booksellers. In 1946 Cyril Connolly, the editor of Horizon, submitted a questionnaire to a selection of leading British authors, seeking their views on such matters as "How much do you think a writer needs to live on?", "...what do you think is the most suitable second occupation for him?" (very politically incorrect phraseology these days, but retained in the new book), and whether they had any advice for young people. Now Waterstone's has repeated the experiment, canvassing the opinions of authors such as A.S. Byatt, Melvyn Bragg, Fay Weldon, Will Self and thirty-eight others, and reprinting fifteen of the original Horizon replies. The best contribution, past or present, comes from Maclaren-Ross, the uncrowned king of wartime Fitzrovia, whose Memoirs of the Forties (1965) is an acknowledged classic. He writes: "Your questionnaire arrived at an opportune moment, when I was at my wits end to know which way to turn for money. This situation is always arising with me. Hence, my answer to your first question is: A writer needs all he can lay his hands on in order to keep alive." He concludes: "...if I have advice to give to anyone who wants to write for a living, it is this:
(a) Don't attempt it.
(b) If you are crazy enough to try, be tough; get all you can. Price your work high and make them pay. Don't listen to your publisher's sob-stories about how little he can afford. He'll have a country house and polo ponies when you are still borrowing the price of a drink in Fitzrovia...
"And by the same token, please pay promptly for this contribution, because I am broke."
Maclaren-Ross would have been amused that the Cost of Letters is published with Arts Council support. His comments on that august body would be priceless.
Memoirs of the Forties is regrettably out of print, though easily obtainable in its two paperback editions, Penguin (1984) and Sphere/Cardinal (1991). Novelist, short-story writer, bookman, dandy, raconteur, lady's man, parodist, screenwriter, TV and radio scriptwriter, wartime conscript, Duke of Redonda and incompetent gardener-for-hire in Bognor Regis (he landed in court for uprooting some prize seedlings), Maclaren-Ross was an outstanding talent, and his writing invariably proves a tonic. One need read only the opening page of Memoirs to realize he was a comic master. He describes the evangelical fanaticism of an instructor during a commercial course in London in 1938: "I was there because I had answered an advertisement which began INTELLIGENT MEN WANTED, and found out too late it that meant learning to sell vacuum cleaners." Ross capitalized on this humdrum occupation by writing a novel about the vacuum cleaner trade, Of Love and Hunger (1947). Ironically, and unfairly, he is best known nowadays as the model for X. Trapnel, the unconventional writer in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. Julian's great friend the writer C.K. Jaeger - a hero of Memoirs of the Forties - was rightly incensed by the scruffy, downbeat presentation of Trapnel's character in the recent Channel Four dramatization of the novel sequence: Ross was famed for his immaculate appearance. (He is unfairly described as "raffish" in the Cost of Letters.) He also appears as Dorian Scott-Chrichton in Rayner Heppenstall's novel The Lesser Infortune (1953). "Work was planned for ten years ahead" in Scott-Chrichton's notebook, which sounds characteristic of Ross.
He was born James McLaren Ross in South Norwood, London, on 7 July 1912. His father John Lambden Ross was of mixed Scottish and Latin American blood, and his mother, from an Anglo-Indian family, has been described as "a magnificent Indian lady (Bengali?) and the obvious source of his male beauty". Maclaren-Ross was largely educated in the South of France, though his charming memoir The Weeping and the Laughter (1953) principally concerns his boyhood in a Bournemouth suburb.
Maclaren-Ross was discharged from the army in 1943 for being absent without leave: he was found in bed with a girlfriend in North London. He undoubtedly would have been of greater service between the sheets than in helping to win the war against Germany, being something of a military liability. Ross became a fixture at the Wheatsheaf pub in Rathbone Place, Fitzrovia, holding court night after night to a host of mesmerized listeners as he acted out scenes from his favourite films, talked of future writing projects and inveighed against the crimes and shortcomings of publishers. With his teddy-bear overcoat, dark mirror glasses, carnation and gold- or silver-topped cane this Ancient Mariner of the Forties was a "dangerous dandy" as the New Zealand writer Dan Davin called him. In his essay "Good Night, Julian, Everywhere" (Closing Times, 1975) Davin describes Julian's regular routine: "Midday in the pub till closing time, a late lunch at the Scala restaurant in Charlotte Street, roast beef with as much fat as possible and lashings of horse-radish sauce. A stroll to look at the bookshops in Charing Cross Road and to buy Royalty, his special jumbo-sized American cigarettes. Opening time again at the Wheatsheaf till closing time. A hurried dash to the Highlander which closed half an hour later. Back to the Scala for supper and coffee. At midnight the tube home from Goodge Street, where a mad blonde known as the Goodge Street Whore lurked in ambush, convinced he was a homo and therefore a blackleg, and waiting to rave insults until the train bore us away."
So bound up was he with his own character that Maclaren-Ross constructed and enlarged on the cult of his personality. He was a monologuist rather than a conversationalist. Davin writes: "Julian...had never paid lip service to the convention that requires one occasionally to make a show of listening to others." Somewhat paranoid, he took refuge in various personae, among whom was Mr Hyde. "I am Mr Hyde today," the writer Anthony Cronin heard him tell the barman at the Caves de France in Soho. "It appeared that he became Mr Hyde when he was feeling particularly vengeful or sinister." He told Cronin that Iris Murdoch had used his character in one of her novels: "All these young women put me in their books. They think I'm wicked you see. Of course they put me in disguise, but that doesn't fool me. As you know, Cronin, I'm a master of disguise."
The 1940s was the bibulous era of Nina Hamnett, Dylan Thomas, Augustus John and J. Meary Tambimuttu - a time of legends when all manner of writers and artists congregated in the pubs north of Oxford Street, and Fitzrovia flourished for a time as London's Latin Quartier. Maclaren-Ross became the proud chronicler of this tiny but significant province of Bohemia. It was at this period that Ross was at his most prolific. He published some acclaimed collections of short stories, The Stuff to Give the Troops (1944), Better than a Kick in the Pants (1945), both containing his tales of army life, and The Nine Men of Soho (1946). Influenced by Hemingway, he aimed in his stories to "create a completely English equivalent of the American vernacular".
He planned a four-part autobiography, "Lost Atlantis", but poverty-stricken for most of his later life he was able to complete only The Weeping and the Laughter - a title, of course, borrowed from Ernest Dowson's famous "Vitae summa brevis..."; perhaps, as has been suggested, via Waldo Lydecker's quoting from the poem in Otto Preminger's noir classic Laura (1944). His long planned fictional masterpiece, "Night's Black Agents", never got written. Anthony Cronin, in Dead As Doornails (1976), called him "one of the ruined men of Soho" which the war created: "he liked the myth of apparent failure; forms of revenge intrigued him and forms of mysterious return; the ruined gambler with one last throw, the heir who would reappear one stormy night, the Jacobite exile who would live to see the usurpers humbled".
Ross describes the classic dilemma of the Fitzrovian writer-boozer in a passage in Memoirs of the Forties explaining how he first met Tambimuttu, the founder and editor of Poetry London, in the Swiss pub in Soho in 1943.
"Only beware of Fitzrovia," Tambi said... "It's a dangerous place, you must be careful."
"Fights with knives?"
"No, a worse danger. You might get Sohoitis you know."
"No I don't. What is it?"
"If you get Sohoitis," Tambi said very seriously, "you will stay there always day and night and get no work done ever. You have been warned."
"Is this Fitzrovia?"
"No, Old Compton Street, Soho. You are safer here."
Alan Ross, Maclaren-Ross's editor on London Magazine, wrote: "Soho changed quickly after V E Day, its former inhabitants moving out or on, marrying, getting jobs, dying. Julian stayed put, obsolete and friendless." Ross was often lonely, apart from his creditors. Anthony Powell recalls in The Strangers All Are Gone (1982) that in the 1950s, when Ross regularly collected his review copies from the Punch office in Bouverie Street "a covey of bailiffs came into being outside, where they hung about ominously on the steps..."
One of many amusing passages in Memoirs of the Forties describes how Ross and his sometime friend Peter Brooke (Anthony Carson) collaborated briefly on a surreal Chestertonian thriller, "The Monastery of Information", which Brooke had sketched out: "The basic elements included an astrally projected Tibetan lamasery, controlled from the forbidden city itself and invisible to all except those in a state of ecstasy: drunks, lovers, etc; there was also a London bank which financed the nefarious operations of the Tibetan fifth-column with phantom money and was manned by cashiers stuffed with straw. Murders of people who knew too much were committed by a band of trained commando midgets, and the conspiracy's total aim was world domination, narrowly averted." Alas, the book never materialized, and the world of fantasy thrillers is clearly the poorer for it.
Ross died from a heart attack in November 1964, with his memoirs of Fitzrovia only half completed. Alan Ross wrote in tribute to him: "These fragments of autobiography [Memoirs of the Forties], his wartime stories, The Weeping and the Laughter and his novel Of Love and Hunger may not be a lot to remember him by, but they are enough."
"Someone should write a biography of Julian," Mr Ross told the present writer.
Waterstone's Guide to London Writing (1999) devotes some space to Maclaren-Ross. A rare photograph of him appears in Fitzrovia: London's Bohemia, by Michael Bakewell (The National Portrait Gallery, 1999).