The Lost King of Bohemia: Julian Maclaren-Ross and his world

Today, in an age of anaemic sensations and choreographed leisure, we have lost much of the verve of instantaneous life so central to Maclaren-Ross.

Somewhere between the extents of Purgatory and Pimlico, in a mesh of pubs and boarding houses, Julian Maclaren-Ross died in 1964 aged just fifty-two. His last few years were tarnished by alcoholism and poverty. Left behind were a series of memoirs, some novels and considerable reams of journalism which attested to his strange talent and disjointed life.

Many of the most eminent writers of the day had recognised his ability and attempted to promote him, only to reckon without a nonconformity that tended to self-destruction. Both his creative well and ultimate nemesis, Bohemianism set an indestructible pattern which he could never successfully evade.

His is also a story of a vanished London of artistic coteries and bibulous eccentrics, where a world emerging from war hesitantly found solace. It was the golden age of landmarks like the Fitzroy Tavern or Bricklayers Arms in which the various tribes of the capital’s demi-monde would form loyalties or resentments. Perhaps it was the last time literary life was so embedded in the fabric of the city - a churning carousel of chancers, boozers and occasionally lost brilliance.

‘One of my earliest memories is of bring snatched from my cot and carried out in my father’s arms on to the lawn of our house at Ramsgate, just in time to see a German Zeppelin cast its shadow on the rooftop from the vast moonlit menace of the sky.’

Maclaren-Ross grew up in the shadow of conflict, still a young child when the Great War ended, transforming the world forever.

His antecedents were exotic and precarious - one grandfather served as a soldier in India and Burma, staving off bankruptcy by a series of accounts of big game hunting; the other, a Scottish-Cuban shipping owner, had plantations in America.

Though not rich the family had sufficient capital to assure moderate comfort on the South coast of England. In a bid to enhance their lifestyle they moved to France in 1921 where Julian was enrolled in a French school, ensuring a bilingualism he would retain throughout his life.

Already evident were traits of disruption and independence which would define his later career. After being expelled at sixteen he decamped to his parents’ home on the Riviera, moving in circles of aristocrats and emigres seeing at first hand the trauma of displacement in the White Russian diaspora.

It was a naturally finite situation and, seeking to channel his restless creativity into an obvious form, he left for England in 1933.

Awaiting him was the debris of the economic crash and the slow disintegration of hopes for peace. Maclaren-Ross rapidly joined the throngs of the dispossessed when his grandfather cancelled his allowance and a hastily arranged marriage collapsed.

Like Orwell he was plunged into genteel poverty but the threats of indigence were not the means of a political pilgrimage or reversion to bourgeois norms. Instead contingency and desperation forced Maclaren-Ross to find a form to interrogate the chaos around him and convey it in art.

In this endeavour unorthodoxy had its merits. Unencumbered by university education or technical training he had no academic or theoretical framework to control his experiments; he would be wholly guided by his experience and instincts.

Drawing on a wealth of brief encounters and transitory relations, he honed an ability to draw characters with a few strokes of dialogues. With the immediacy of a gifted raconteur he learned to illuminate the neglected and bizarre aspects of a scenario with directness and clarity.

Though untutored, his style was non uniformed fusing slang and argot to terse elliptical sentences to illuminate both varieties of Englishness and the emerging dynamics of American prose.

The outbreak of war in 1939 hastened his rise as his taut vernacular pieces captured the regulated absurdity of military bureaucracy. Horizon magazine published his first story, ‘A Bit of a Smash in Madras’, in which finely wrought conversations reveal the mannerisms and attitudes of officers in the Raj.

Enough promise was evinced for Jonathan Cape to publish a collection of his stories and success seemed attainable.

Nemesis arrived in the form of conscription, placing Maclaren-Ross in a system he was constitutionally incapable of complying with. A series of escapades ended with his detention in a military prison.

Returning to civilian life in 1943, he joined Dylan Thomas in producing propaganda films for the war effort. Though both were combustible personalities, they managed to intersperse drinking sessions with enough work to be effective.

During this phase Maclaren-Ross adopted the apparel that would typify most future descriptions of him. His biographer Paul Willetts writes:

‘Dressed in either a camel-hair coat or an astrakhan-collared alternative, together with a pale suit and brightly patterned tie, augmented by a cane, cigarette-holder, snuff-box and dark glass, Maclaren-Ross staked out his favourite spot at the bar.’

Whatever misfortunes befell him, he presented a carapace of unruffled and slightly menacing dandyism.

Propelled by journalism and short stories, a novel finally appeared in 1947, cementing his literary reputation.

‘Of Love and Hunger’ looks back to the 1930s and a stint as a vacuum cleaner salesman on the South Coast. Desperation and futility seep out of every paragraph but are arrested by a mordant wit and a deep involvement with the crisis of era. Hitler is on the march and the strained edifice of appeasement is disintegrating. All personal catastrophes are slowly enveloped into a universal trial.

As taut as Raymond Chandler and as bleakly funny as Evelyn Waugh, this book is the best place for any inquirer to start.

Feted by figures like John Betjeman, Olivia Manning and Anthony Powell, Julian Maclaren-Ross enjoyed flickering achievement, gradually abraded by deepening alcohol and amphetamine dependency.

Still capable of perceptive journalism and intriguing radio plays, his decline was not the unmitigated tragedy it sometimes appears. To the end he still commanded loyalty from a committed band of supporters immune to his erratic fluctuations.

Today, in an age of anaemic sensations and choreographed leisure, we have lost much of the verve of instantaneous life so central to Maclaren-Ross. Through crazed binges and terrifying misadventures, he produced work of immediacy and power waiting urgently to be rediscovered.

Let us raise a glass!