Julian Maclaren-Ross was a writer who defined the sleazy allure of bohemian London. His writing, infused with an Americanized vernacular, introduced a new, colloquial style to English fiction. He was a pioneer across numerous genres, from film essays to reportage, and his literary criticism demonstrated rare acuity. Celebrated for his distinctive voice and diverse body of work, he has become a cult figure admired for his lasting influence.
This collection of Julian MacLaren-Ross's work is a mix of short and longer fiction, plus journalism and literary commentary. The collection anchors around MacLaren-Ross's bestselling 1950s Novella Bout, an episode in the pre-war lives of a smart set in the south of France.
Julian Maclaren-Ross, with his carnation and silver-topped cane, his fur coat and dark glasses, was a natural bohemian and one of the most colourful inhabitants and chroniclers of the Soho and Fitzrovia of the forties, fifties and sixties. He knew and wrote about its most memorable characters including Dylan Thomas, Graham Greene, Cyril Connolly, Tambimuttu, Nina Hamnett and Woodrow Wyatt. He was something of a dandy and a gifted raconteur, and his life, often chaotic, and related unsentimentally by him in these memoirs, veered between the fringes of the literary establishment and occasional homelessness. Evoking a demolished era of incendiary bombs and rationing, Maclaren-Ross misses none of it and provides an anecdotal history of the place that, between the bombs, offered writers and artists a home away from home."An entertaining portrait of a wartime London seldom shown, together with six of the author's best stories." (B-O-T Editorial Review Board)
No writer led as bizarre and eventful a life as the once celebrated Soho dandy Julian Maclaren-Ross (1912-64). In the course of 52 hectic years, he endured homelessness, alcoholism, drug addiction, and near-insanity. The world of Maclaren-Ross's writing tends to be the dingy, down-at-heel world of smoke-veiled bars, rented lodgings, blacked-out streets, and wartime army garrisons, first-hand experience lending his work a frisson of authenticity. Whether they're narrated in the breathless, slangy voice of an uneducated soldier, or the clipped cadences of a colonial 'expat', whether they're set on the French Riviera or wartime England, they're imprinted with Maclaren-Ross's unmistakable literary logo. The prevailing tone is casual, matter-of-fact, and laconic, with his characteristically mordant, humorous asides failing to conceal the melancholy that seeps through their harboiled surfaces.
The key literary figure in the pubs of post-war Fitzrovia, Maclaren-Ross pulled together his dispersed energies to write two great books: the posthumously published Memoirs of the Forties and this spectacular novel of the Depression, Of Love and Hunger - harsh, vivid, louche, and slangy, it deserves a permanent place alongside 'Coming Up for Air' and 'Hangover Square'.