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. 

of love and hunger [julian maclaren ross]

Sometimes the quality of a novel can be measured by the paucity of the action. Nothing happens, and yet you’re still gripped. Of Love and Hunger, with its pretentious title, is one of those. The story is banal. The South Coast of England, 1939. Richard Fanshawe is a disillusioned vacuum cleaner salesman, who falls in love with Sukie, the wife of a man who has asked him to keep an eye on her whilst he’s away at sea for three months. The affair is desultory and doomed. War breaks out. The end.

At some point you think, something’s going to happen, there’s going to be a twist, but there isn’t and it doesn’t matter. The novelist has managed to conjure up a time and a place and a way of thinking and that’s all that’s required. None of the characters are particularly sympathetic and that doesn’t matter either.  What remains is a surgical evaluation of the way people get on with one another, men and women, men and men, women and women. It gets under the surface and traces the undercurrents that permeate any conversation; the way in which when we converse, our speech is an echo chamber for our thoughts.

There might be a dissertation to be written on the role of the vacuum cleaner in 20th century British literature. Like Greene’s Wormold in Our Man in Havana, the vacuum cleaner industry permits Fanshawe to earn a living, albeit a marginal, desperate one. Nothing seems to sum up the era more than the well-educated, supposedly middle-class graduate, resorting to giving comical demonstrations of primitive vacuum cleaners to get by. The desperation of the times is also captured in Fanshawe’s listless amorality. But this is preferable to the scene at a provincial dance, where the South English burghers express their approval of Hitler’s treatment of the Jews in a manner which has terrifying echoes of contemporary Daily Mail mores. A ripple of fascism which hints at a different turn history might have taken. It almost feels as though everyone’s waiting for the war, which will be like pressing the reset button, creating a sense of order to replace the listlessness and re-establish some kind of moral compass. MacLaren Ross captures the time to a T. It doesn’t seem so very far from the world of Sartre’s Nausea, (which takes place just the other side of the Channel); only that the angst is kept permanently bottled up, existentialism always at arm’s length.

Of Love and Hunger might be a minor work, but it’s also a minor jewel. This is the word employed as scalpel, the writer as surgeon.