LETTERS: Julian Maclaren-Ross: Selected Letters Edited by Paul WillettsBlack Spring Press 351pp. £9.95.
IN HIS CLASSIC memoir of post-second World War Dublin and London, Dead as Doornails, the poet and critic Anthony Cronin recalls a figure who "seemed to personify several different modes and eras at once". The figure is Julian Maclaren-Ross, short-story writer, memoirist and reviewer extraordinaire: "He wore a belted fawn overcoat that suggested the fast thirties and a polo-necked sweater which hinted at a different persona of the same decade, but he carried a gold-topped cane which was definitely Edwardian, as was the manner, consisting of 'dear boys' and 'you young men' and 'people of my age'."
The portrait of Maclaren-Ross, who was born in London in 1912 and died there 52 years later, is an affectionate one, but Cronin is clear-eyed about the reality behind the disguise and performance,"like Paul Potts , like even, in his famous way, Dylan Thomas, he was a ruined man to begin with, someone for whom the conditions, the very nature of success and non-success had been altered by public calamity. He was a north Soho, nineteen-forties baby."
The wreck of Maclaren-Ross's life is everywhere in the pages of this Selected Letters, presented and edited with critical zest by Paul Willetts, who seems to have single-handedly and single-mindedly recovered from the dust of oblivion the actual achievement of this haunted, troubled and self-destructive man.
In his stunning biography of Maclaren-Ross, Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia, and in the recovery of Maclaren-Ross's memoirs, selected stories and other writings, Willetts is an angel of mercy.
Indeed Maclaren-Ross had some sprinkling of angel-dust of his own from early on in life, brought up on the continent by a father and mother whose cultural (and financial) connections were not to be sniffed at. In the background, wealth and "connection" but by the time Maclaren-Ross and family had resettled in dear old England of the 1930s, a fall from grace of dramatic proportions beckoned and, sure enough, by the beginning of the second World War and his army "career", Maclaren-Ross was teetering into chaos. Of which the Selected Lettersis ample proof: "I merely want to satisfy myself" he writes, reflecting on his imminent court martial (don't ask) in a missive to the long-suffering Rupert Hart-Davis, "that an intelligent man of 31 [it's 1943], travelled, educated abroad, sophisticated and an anti-fascist, a writer who can write over 17 stories in spare time and get them published, cannot be utilised, owing to his medical category, in any better capacity than an office boy in an orderly room". The same "office boy", a mere 10 or so years later, in January 1956, writing to John Lehmann, editor of the London Magazine, suggests a review-article of 2,000-3,000 words on Beckett's Trilogy, having been reading the novels in French as they appeared, but also having followed Beckett's writing since the early 1930s.
Anyone who had contact with the entertaining, prodigiously talented, obsessive, bettimes paranoic, amphetamine- and alcohol-addicted Maclaren-Ross never forgot him. He belonged to a culture that is no more, along with the kind of publishers, editors, magazines, film and broadcasting world of the 1950s and early 1960s which he barely survived, propelling himself and his various wives and girlfriends from hotel room to apartment to friends' houses to, on occasion, railway station waiting room and park bench, "touching" (or tapping money) as he went along.
Maclaren Ross makes the celebrity grief of contemporary "pop" divas silly and embarrassing. If you want to know the real inside story of the roots of contemporary culture that is, or was, the underpinning to the common literary world shared between Ireland and Britain, then Selected Letterstakes you there.
Looking back at the period when he knew Maclaren-Ross and those others who inhabited a similar "space", both here and there, Cronin's judgment seems as sound today as when he first penned it 30 years ago.
The reviews of Maclaren-Ross's Memoirs were lavish, but they took the form of obituaries. Philip Toynbee described the early stories, and the early success, such as it was. After that he said, "Julian Maclaren-Ross had dropped out of sight". "Perhaps" writes Cronin, "out of sight of the larger literary world maybe: even, for so many years, out of sight of his own talent. But the master of disguise was merely in hiding, and, as some of us knew, that was really him all the time, behind the dark glasses".
An exemplary story indeed, for a host of different reasons, some good, some bad.
Selected Lettersand all the other books of Maclaren-Ross's - the fiction, the memoirs, the letters, his life - are worth taking the trouble over. Paul Willetts and the Maclaren-Ross estate have been well served by Black Spring Press, although one can't help imagining the man in dark glasses is around somewhere querying the terms and conditions of his legacy as much as he inspects the exacting life he inherited and lived through in these obsessive Selected Letters.
Gerald Dawe's most recent poetry collection, Points West, was recently published by Gallery Press. Catching the Light, a volume of literary views and interviews (Salmon) was published this month. In November, Blackstaff will publish his anthology, Earth Voices Whispering: Irish War Poetry 1914-1945. He teaches at Trinity College Dublin