Memoirs of the Forties by Julian Maclaren-Ross

First published: 1965

Type of work: Memoir

Time of work: The 1940’s

Locale: London

Principal Personages:

• Julian Maclaren Ross, a short-story writer, novelist, and raconteur
• Graham Greene, a novelist
• Cyril Connolly, a journalist and literary critic
• Dylan Thomas, a Welsh poet
• J. Meary Tambimuttu, a Ceylonese impresario, editor of Poetry London
• Alun Lewis, a Welsh poet and short-story writer, killed in World War II before he turned thirty

Form and Content

Reminiscent of such colorful personalities as Marcel Proust and Oscar Wilde, Julian Maclaren-Ross, with his teddy-bear fur coat, malacca cane, white corduroy jacket, dark glasses, and lapel carnation, fit well into the bohemian atmosphere of the London literary scene of the 1940’s. More important than the image he may have cut, however, is the fact that he was both a participant in and an observer of that scene, and, although he never fancied himself an official historian, his Memoirs of the Forties may be read as a kind of chronicle of Grub Street during that decade.

In the note at the beginning of Memoirs of the Forties Maclaren-Ross admits that he is not a professional literary man but rather a professional writer, and that anyone seeking scandal or inside accounts of literary politics would do well to seek them elsewhere. His stated goal is to portray as accurately as he can the various writers, publishers, editors, artists, and other personages with whom he came into contact during the 1940’s. More than that, however, he emphasizes that he has tried to elude the trap open to writers of memoirs of falsifying incidents in order to make them more interesting to the reader. To achieve his goal, he presents what first strikes the reader as a random collection of conversations, incidents, and stories. Indeed, Maclaren-Ross readily confesses that he has a weakness regarding dates. Thus, in an exact chronological sense, neither he nor the reader can be sure when a particular conversation or incident took place. Emphasizing his photographic memory for details of such conversations and incidents, however, he assures the reader that they surely did occur as he narrates them and that they are, moreover, accurate. The reader, then, must not be overly concerned by the absence of an orderly chronology of events, situations, or conversations, but rather must take them all as they come and let the overall impressions develop as they may.

The book is divided into four sections—“Prologue,” “The Forties,” “Second Lieutenant Lewis,” and “Some Stories.” The prologue consists of three chapters that focus on Maclaren-Ross’ struggles as a young writer seeking a publisher for his stories—a writer with, as he puts it, no useful connections to smooth the way. Sometimes selling vacuum cleaners, sometimes going on the dole, he makes his rounds among publishers on Grub Street until the British Broadcasting Corporation gives him the assignment of adapting Graham Greene’s A Gun for Sale (1936) for radio. Although he does receive fifteen pounds for his efforts, the impending war and general bureaucratic delays bring the project to naught.

The second section of the book, “The Forties,” consists of eight chapters, the first of which concerns Maclaren-Ross’ meeting with Cyril Connolly, the editor of Horizon, and the latter’s acceptance of the young writer’s story “A Bit of a Smash in Madras” for publication. The second deals with some of Maclaren-Ross’ army experiences and his meeting with Woodrow Wyatt, a young socialist barrister, who with his wife edited English Story and who agreed to publish some of his stories. The remaining chapters of this section are a series of portraits of notable people of the decade, including William Cooper Makins, Arthur Calder-Marshall, Dylan Thomas, J. Meary Tambimuttu, Peter Brooke, John Minton, Gerald Wilde, Robert Colquhoun, Robert Macbryde, Feliks Topolski, and Pablo Picasso.

The section titled “Second Lieutenant Lewis” is a chapter in itself—“A Memoir.” It describes the meeting in the army in 1942 between the author and Alun Lewis. The last section, “Some Stories,” consists of six stories: “Y List,” the story of a soldier who suffers pneumonia and pleurisy; “I Had to Go Sick,” the story of another soldier who becomes enmeshed in army red tape as he tries to get treatment for a bad leg; “A Bit of a Smash in Madras,” the story of an Englishman in India, who hits a native while driving intoxicated and pulls what strings he can to extricate himself from the charges; “Five-Finger Exercise,” the story of a thirty-six-year-old man seducing a sixteen-year-old girl; “Happy As the Day Is Long,” the story of a happy-go-lucky Irishman who tries to bolster the spirits of a down-and-almost-out artist; and “The Swag, the Spy, and the Soldier,” the story of a group of people living a bohemian existence and an unemployed former amusement-park worker who involves them in a case of theft.

Originally, Maclaren-Ross intended two more sections for his book—one titled “Ham” and the second “The Epilogue.” Because of his untimely death in 1964, these were never completed.

Critical Context

The 1940’s marked the high point of Julian Maclaren-Ross’ literary career. During this decade he published in rapid succession three collections of short stories, The Stuff to Give the Troops: Twenty-five Tales of Army Life (1944), Better Than a Kick in the Pants (1945), and The Nine Men of Soho (1946), and two novels, Bitten by the Tarantula: A Story of the South of France (1945) and Of Love and Hunger (1947). The promise of these works, which are marked by a fresh, idiosyncratic style, was not fulfilled; in subsequent years, Maclaren-Ross’ only significant publications were a reminiscence of his childhood, The Weeping and the Laughter: A Chapter of Autobiography (1953), intended to serve as the first installment of a multivolume autobiography (never completed), and the unfinished, posthumously issued Memoirs of the Forties.

The period covered by Memoirs of the Forties is treated in many other literary memoirs as well; the reader sees the same people and events from diverse and sometimes contradictory perspectives. Two fellow memoirists who must be read with Maclaren-Ross are Alan Ross, editor, poet, and cricket writer, and Anthony Powell, author of the twelve-novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-1975). Ross, who was largely responsible for the publication of Memoirs of the Forties, includes a portrait of Maclaren-Ross in his memoir Blindfold Games (1986); in addition, his introduction to the 1984 Penguin edition of Memoirs of the Forties provides an excellent overview of Maclaren-Ross’ life and work. Powell, whose fictional character X. Trapnel, featured in several novels in A Dance to the Music of Time, was based on Maclaren-Ross, recalls that colorful figure and his milieu in The Strangers All Are Gone (1982), the concluding volume of his memoirs, To Keep the Ball Rolling (1976-1982).

Bibliography

Davenport, John. “Ghosts and Gargoyles,” in The Spectator. October 1, 1965, p. 414.

Pritchett, V.S. “Those Were the Days,” in New Statesman. LXX (September 24, 1965), pp. 446-448.

The Times Literary Supplement. Review. October 21, 1965, p. 937.

Toynbee, Phillip. Review in The Observer. September 12, 1965, p. 26.