memoirs of the forties [maclaren ross]

When I travel, something that’s been happening slightly too frequently of late, I normally try to pick up something to read from the place I’m visiting. Literature is a portal to a place just as much as a visit. Usually I attempt to find a more contemporaneous take on my destination, but this isn’t essential. 

Right now, I’m in between and betwixt. On the basis of the past couple of years, you could either say I live in two places, or none. It’s an awkward balance. The two places that I’d call home are Ciudad Vieja and a nebulous part of London which probably has its epicentre in Soho/ Fitzrovia. A location which also became the epicentre of Maclaren Ross’ world, a place he documents in his memoir. Reading the book over the past week or so, the overlaps are striking. He goes to the local pubs, has generally unproductive meetings with publishers and film companies, hangs out, occasionally comes across celebrities, gets drunk a lot, ruminates, writes. I may have only actually lived there very briefly, a few months at best, but these twinned London barrios have been a constant in my life for nigh on thirty years. 

What’s beguiling is the way in which this world has and hasn’t changed. The British intellectual attitude to realism and verisimilitude doesn’t seem to have altered one bit. Maclaren Ross disappoints Cyril Connoly and several others when they discover he’s never been to India after having been impressed by a story set in Madras. As though the use of the imagination is a faintly dishonourable way of going about the creative process. The desperate hunger in the British arts for “authentic” voices persists to this day. The physical space has not changed nearly as much as some other parts of the city. A few of the pubs Maclaren Ross frequented are still there, even if they’re not regular haunts of mine, although the other day we emerged from a meeting at the BFI in Stephen Street and went round the corner to a little pub I’d never visited, which does indeed pop up in the memoirs.

In other ways, Maclaren Ross’ Soho/ Fitzrovia feels more like my experience of Ciudad Vieja. A place where you are always liable to run into someone, where the barmen and women know your drinking habits, where the need to socialise is an imperative, driven by the need to feel alive in the face of a fear that the whole caboodle isn’t really worth it. Post-war London, in the eyes of Maclaren Ross, didn’t quite have the same sense of its own importance as it does today. These memoirs also occur during the war, when the very act of just keeping going was all that was required as motivation to write, or create. or socialise.

Perhaps, in conclusion, my two worlds, or homes, aren’t so far apart after all. Perhaps, when I roam the narrow streets of Soho, Fitzrovia or Ciudad Vieja, they are all, in some fashion which is greater than geography, the same place after all. Maclaren Ross’ memoirs inevitably relate a world which no longer exists; but maybe it can still be found if you’re willing to venture further afield.