Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia: The Bizarre Life of Writer, Actor, Soho Raconteur Julian Maclaren-Ross

by Paul Willetts

No writer, not even Hemingway or Rimbaud, led as bizarre and eventful a life as the once celebrated Soho dandy Julian Maclaren-Ross (1912-64). Next to him, the conventional icons of London bohemia, among them Francis Bacon and Jeffrey Bernard, appear models of stability and self-restraint.

Genres: Biography, London

348 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Paul Willetts is the author of two previous works of non-fiction – Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia and North Soho 999. Since making his literary debut in 2003, he’s edited four much-praised collections of writing by the bohemian dandy, Julian Maclaren-Ross. He has also compiled and worked as co-photographer on Teenage Flicks, a jokey celebration of Subbuteo, featuring contributions by Will Self, Graham Taylor, David Baddiel and others. His journalism has appeared in The Independent, The Times, The TLS, The Spectator, The Independent on Sunday and other publications.

Reviews

[Nigeyb · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia the biography of the English writer and dandy, Julian Maclaren-Ross (1912-64).

Julian Maclaren-Ross is synonymous with the bohemian world of mid-twentieth-century Soho, and whilst this features extensively in this book, the biography offers plenty more besides. If you're interested in the literary history of the 1930 and 1940s, World War 2, and London (and specifically Soho), then I feel confident you'll enjoy this biography.

During his lifetime Julian Maclaren-Ross appears to have produced a substantial and astonishingly diverse body of writing. He was usually motivated by a chronic lack of cash. Like many of his generation and class he enjoyed an affluent and comfortable middle-class Edwardian upbringing, only to discover the family money was gone by the 1930s. What money he made seemed to be spent almost immediately, frequently in Soho hostelries. The constant need for cash meant when he wasn't holding court in a pub he was writing. All of this made for a turbulent and interesting life. Paul Willetts describes him as a "mediocre caretaker of his own immense talent". That seems to sum up his self-destructive life.

Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia was a follow up to the five Patrick Hamilton novels and a Patrick Hamilton biography that I completed before reading this book. This biography followed on beautifully, although I was disappointed to learn that the two never appear to have met.

After finishing this biography I bought and read other books by Julian Maclaren-Ross Memoirs of the Forties; Selected Stories; and Of Love and Hunger, all or which are splendid, and also well worth reading.

4/5

[Simon Hollway · Rating 3 out of 5]

A feat of prodigious and meticulous research, it sadly fails to breath life into its subject, ending up as little more than a reconstructed diary and a ledger of debts and commission payments. Undoubtedly, a boorish prig, MacLaren-Ross was a prolific writer and a proto-Patrick Hamilton, siring a clutch of 'small classics' and a ream of on-the-nail parodies. For instance, I was drooling to see a brief gobbet of his 'Salad of the Bad Cafe' but as with the absence of quips from this infamous raconteur, there were also no evocative literary crits or examples of his contemporaneously praised scribblings.
The end result is a 'drab inventory' and it is such a shame. The fleeting revelation towards the very end that Olivia Manning based Prince Yakimov on Maclaren-Ross in her Balkan Trilogy breathed more life into him than the entire biography.
I apologise for such a mean assessment - the author has undertaken a remarkably diligent detective chronicle and revived an impossibly inaccessible cold case. However, we aren't even afforded the opportunity to separate the art from the diabolical personality of the artist as the art side of the equation is oddly absent.
It must have been galling for Maclaren-Ross to have been a jobbing screen and radio play writer, a prolific broadsheet review writer, a published novelist, an acquaintance of so many immensely successful authors and artists, yet never to have found the success his ego so cravenly craved. There must be some reference to what he truly felt in quiet moments on his own to be excavated from within his memoirs or screenplays but they don't appear here. I was hoping for a biography that managed to penetrate the man's self-delusional bluster; some extended recognition of how he managed to churn out so much copy whilst consuming so much alcohol, amphetamines and friends and creditors' patience whilst constantly doing moonlight flits from unpaid hotel bills and sleeping in railway stations.
Curiously, the short introduction and epilogue are wonderful - more opinion and comment from the author would have enlivened the bits in between. I wish he had been a bit braver as this might then have proved to be Julian's posthumous renaissance that his Memoirs from the Forties all too briefly fulfilled.

[Patrick Powell · Rating 3 out of 5]

You might have heard of Julian MacLaren-Ross or perhaps just the name, but more probably you have not. He does have a Wikipedia entry, but frankly that is of less significance than it might seem to some. Even a brief outline of his life would – ironically given the details – rather oversell him and the very little he achieved.

He was born in 1912 into a family which had once been wealthy but whose wealth was slowly diminishing. When MacLaren-Ross was a young man, that wealth was large enough to allow his father and his family to live a life of leisure, although for some reason they always rented property rather than bought it. Buying might have been a better investment, but judging by the many, many bad decisions MacLaren-Ross made, good judgment was scarce in that family,

The Ross family – Julian MacLaren-Ross’s original name was, in fact, the simpler and a little more straightforward James Ross – lived in South London, where he was born in 1912. Then they moved to the South Coast of England 

and then on the South Coast of France, where the exchange rate in the 1920s made the cost of living substantially cheaper and the Ross family were able to live quite grandly.

MacLaren-Ross did not have any formal schooling until his early teens, by when he was bi-lingual in English and French.

In early 1930s he struck out on his own, and moved to London, to Soho and its environs, sustained by an allowance from his grandfather that provided him with an income sufficient to live on for several years.

He saw himself as a literary man, a man of letters, and he did indeed have a facility with words, although he did not get any of his short stories yet published.

Unfortunately, the Depression of the 1930s put paid to all that, and his allowance came to an end and MacLaren-Ross was obliged to find some way of earning his living. He tried to do this by working, in turn, for two vacuum cleaner companies, selling their product from door-to-door.

That phase of his life lasted only a few months and he finally turned to the local Bognor Labour Exchange for unemployment benefit. Then when World War II started, he was eventually drafted into the Army.

His military career was not at all successful, not least because an old knee injury was exacerbated by the square-bashing, and he was finally detailed to typing and clerical duties. It was during those early years that he wrote a few ‘Army stories’, mainly recounting, in exaggerated form, what had been happening to him.

After MacLaren-Ross apparently went absent without leave – he had, in fact, simply not returned on time because he was trying to persuade the War Office in Londin to give him a wartime role he felt was more suited to his abilities – he was marked down for a court martial. In the process of being dishonourably discharged he was sectioned to an Army mental hospital.

Once he and the military had finally parted company, he returned to London for Soho where, more or less, he spent the remaining 20 years of his increasingly rickety and often destitute life. He died of heart failure at the age of 53.

Over those 20 years, MacLaren Ross wrote quite a few short stories, two novels, a many radio scripts and undertook some screenwriting, for television as well as for films. He did a great deal of book reviewing and essays (and his friend the novelist Anthony Powell, who was the Times Literary Supplement’s reviews editors, passed a lot of work his way).

He haunted the literary magazines and publishing houses of London trying to sell his work, and although he was occasionally disciplined enough to write when he chose to be disciplined, his bad habit of talking publishers into giving him an advance for a work he proposed writing, then not delivering it – and even ‘selling’ the same proposal to several different publishers – alienated more and more of them. He thus he dissipated any of the goodwill he might at first have enjoyed.

MacLaren-Ross spend all his time after noon – he never rose before then – number of pubs and he drank a great deal too much. When the pubs were shut between 2.30pm and 5pm, he went to one of several drinking clubs. His continual drinking meant he was always short of money. He cadged drinks and loans from pub and bar acquaintances and never bought a round or paid them back.

After closing time, he went to one or two late night drinking clubs are what passed for restaurants where he would the only solid food of the day. Once back at wherever happened to be his home in the early hours, he completed long overnight writing stints, keeping himself awake and alert by downing amphetamines.

He was markedly egocentric and much given to holding forth in long monologues about himself and his plans and stories he intended to write to a circle of admirers. In time, as he aged from a charming thirtysomething who tales were enthralling into a man in his late forties who habitually repeated his anecdotes, he slowly came to be regarded by many as a bore best avoided. He habitually carried a silver-topped walking stick and almost always wore aviator-style sunglasses, indoors and out, night and day.

As a tall, dark-haired and good-looking man in his thirties during the last years of the war and the early post-war years, he was not short of a bevy of admirers who were inclined to indulge him and his eccentricities. But when the war ended, then then the decade, with the 1950s his day in the sun was coming to a close. The world moved on, but MacLaren-Ross did not.

In those last 20 years of his life since 1943 he lived in hotels, many quite grand, almost always in Central London within walking distance of Soho and what came to be known as Fitzrovia; sometimes he and the woman he was then with would live for a few weeks or a month or two in a flat, the rents being paid mainly by his partner. In time, they became fed up with the lifestyle and left him, but he soon had another on his arm.

Because he was always drinking his money away – and pissing the readies right up the wall by never using the Tube and always travelling by taxi cab, even short distances – he always skipped out of hotels because he could not settle his bill or was evicted from his apartments as the rent so so much in arrears.

Some in the literary world – among whom were also Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, the poet and publisher John Lehman and the ubiquitous Cyril Connolly (who also made little of himself and did not do justice to whatever talent he was thought to have) – were said to have admired MacLaren-Ross’s work.

Yet frankly that also says rather less than one might assume: it cost nothing for an established writer to give a fellow, less successful scribbler a nod of praise, and such vaunted plaudits are all part of the literary game. It be no more than a throwaway phrase, in fact, or a good review.

Similarly with his acquaintanceships: with the poet Dylan Thomas (with whom he worked in the Ministry of Information for a while), painters and composers and other eccentrics knocking about the demi-monde of Soho: MacLaren-Ross would have been just one of many who knew them and who they all knew. Others were Quentin Crisp, John Minton, Nina Hamnett, Joan Wyndham, Aleister Crowley, John Deakin, Augustus John, Robert Colquhoun, Olivia Manning and Robert MacBryde, all certainly Soho stalwarts and all just was well-known to the folk boozing in Soho.

He stood out because of his cane, his often grand manner, his commanding and sometimes overbearing presence and his perennial sunglasses (which he even refused to removed in the mid-1950s when provided a short five-minute interview for BBC TV).

He could impress with his deep knowledge of books and films, but again there might be less to this than meets the eye: he had the knack of impressing his drinking circle when he held forth, but to what purpose? Discuss.

What of that work? Well, he was lucky that when he eventually started finding a little success with his writing, the wartime conditions – not least because of the paper shortage – made the short story form popular and magazines were crying out for them.

His tales were said to have been succinct, tightly written and often funny, initially in their sardonic account of Army life. But when the war ended, that market also largely closed down as the country at large wanted to put the hardships behind them and no longer wanted to hear Army stories.

In time MacLaren-Ross took to writing thrillers, both for print and as radio plays. Much of his fiction, in whatever form, was a re-working of his life. Often this could be quite macabre: still obsessed with George Orwell’s young widow and angry that she showed no interest in him despite what seemed like an initial attraction, MacLaren-Ross wrote a story, then developed it into a radio play, then again reworked into a film script a scenario in which he murders.

If it is difficult to see what was exceptional about MacLaren-Ross’s fiction and drama, it is also a little difficult to see why Paul Willetts thought a ‘life of Julian MacLaren-Ross’ needed to be written. What Willetts has produced is oddly out of kilter.

A good biographer might use his skills to bring to life and substance pretty much any subject, even one whose existence did not seem to the lay reader at all exciting. But sadly Willetts is not that biographer.

The early chapters of his biography are entertaining and intriguing enough, but it all falls a little flat and dull and eventually quite tedious when he provided us with his longwinded account of MacLaren-Ross’s time in the Army and mental hospital.

Willetts certainly did a lot of very hard working tracking down any number of details, but surely to goodness he did not have to include every single last one? We get what seems like an almost daily account of MacLaren-Ross’s movements between 1943 and his death: where he briefly stayed the landlord or landlady’s name, from which apartments and how soon he was evicted, in which hotels he ran up huge bills, which publisher, radio producer, film company owner or magazine editor he went to see and why and on and on and so on. It does very little for, and add nothing much to the biography: it just gets very wearing.

The irony is that MacLaren-Ross, for all his supposed larger than life persona just doesn’t really come alive: he seems to occupy a no-man’s land between two and three dimensions. I suspect a shorter volume, possibly just a third as long and more of a memoir of MacLaren-Ross would have worked and given Willets attempt to portray the man shape and, dare I say it, rather more interest. As it is, you end up thinking ‘oh well’.

By the way, why are we so intrigued by, and interested in, the kind of demi-monde life – here in wartime Soho, but there are surely many, many others around the world at all times – lived by alcoholics such as MacLaren-Ross?

There are the standard cliches that ‘they live life to the full’ and ‘more authentically’ than us poor wage slaves and early-to-bedders? But are they are they really any happier? MacLaren-Ross certainly wasn’t.

Willetts often makes the point that when he went to visit his friends Mac and his wife Lydia and Dan and Winifred Davin, he appreciated the calm domesticity he found there. And domesticity is not per see ‘boring’. Sadly, in time both Lydia and Winifred got terminally annoyed with MacLaren-Ross’s self-centred lack of consideration, and before he died, both friendships had come to an end.

One good grace of Willett’s biography is that he doesn’t attempt any of that sorry, silly middle-brow Sunday paper supplement psychoanalysis. From Willetts’ we get the facts, ma’am, just the facts (though as I point out, pretty much too many of them in all their trivial detail). I don’t doubt MacLaren-Ross on couch would have delighted many a Freudian voyeur, yet I don’t doubt so, too, would any of the other legion of his fellow Soho boozing pals.

And frankly the title of this biography is also silly: it will have been chosen by some publishing dude or other to try to emulate the ‘notoriety’ of Hunter S. Thompson’s similarly titled work. In fact there is no ‘fear and loathing’ of any kind in this book or MacLaren-Ross’s life. Pretty much the worst thing he did was perpetually to do a moonlight flit to avoid paying his rent and bills.

[A gin and orange, a lemon squash, and a scotch and water, please! · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those rare books that makes me want to run out onto the street and yell “Read this, it’s awesome!”
Like with many good things, I can’t quite remember the first time I read Julian Maclaren-Ross, but it was within the last year or so, guided towards him by the burning star of Patrick Hamilton – or rather, reviews of Hamilton’s works that just happened to mention this articulate and egotistical bohemian dandy. So, intrigued (a little) and wanting something like Patrick-Hamilton-under-another-name (a lot), I picked up “Selected Stories.” And that was it: two stories in, and I was blown away, transported not only by his talent as a writer but by his ability to convey the reader into whatever world the story is set in.
But there was something more, too. Not only did I want to read everything JM-R has ever written (I still do, that’s an ongoing process), I wanted to find out more about the man himself, about the man who could write so beautifully and be so superior, arrogant and (let’s face it) sometimes pretty vile – a not very nice person at all.
And that’s where Paul Willetts’ superb biography comes in. Throughout the book I was astonished at the amount of detail Willetts has uncovered, it really is a remarkable piece of detective work. But I guess given the time, the talent and the resources anyone can do that. What Paul Willetts does – masterfully, in my opinion – is to use these facts and anecdotes to uncover the real man, the real Julian behind the façade. I don’t want to offer any spoilers, but I’m left feeling that JMR portrayed his façade for two reasons: both to protect himself and also because he enjoyed it – he enjoyed being his own version of Oscar Wilde and watching the effect this produced on others. Life’s an illusion, he seems to be saying, this is my contribution, hope you like it because I enjoy playing it.
So, like I said, no spoilers, suffice to say (as someone else said, and I probably misquote, JM-R was an immense talent curated by a mediocre person. Except there is no way that person is mediocre in any shape or form.
Perhaps the best accolade I can give this biography is that Paul Willetts writes as clearly and succinctly as JM-R, and portrays the time and situation of JM-R’s life with equally delicate ease. He uncovers the real man, not the projection; he proves that beneath that brash exterior was a good, if flawed person – why else would so many of his friends have stuck by him and his flaws for so long?
If you like Julian Maclaren-Ross, you’ll love this book; and because of its wide-ranging scope, attention to detail and the ambience of time and place it conveys in its telling, you’ll love it if you’re at all interested in wartime and post-war literature and the literary scene. But most of all you’ll love it as a superb read about a superb writer. Need I say more? Buy it, borrow it, beg it, whatever you do, just read it.
Finally, if you’ve stayed with this review to the end, thank you for reading and what are you waiting for, go read Paul Willetts’ “Fear And Loathing In Fotzrovia.” At best, you’ll thank me forever. At the very least, it’ll stop me having to run yelling down the street.

[CQM · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a huge amount to enjoy in this biography but there are also problems.
The main problem, for me, is that the research into Julian Maclaren-Ross' life is too thorough.
We learn every payment received from publishers, every fiver borrowed and every minor, public house disagreement.
The atmosphere of dull army life and Soho pub life comes across nicely and Maclaren-Ross leaps out at you from the pages but altogether I was worn down by the mundane details.
I will certainly be reading more by Paul Willetts, his North Soho 999: A True Story of Gangs and Gun-Crime in 1940s London was an absolute peach and I feel certain his other books will be closer to that level just by looking at the subject matter.
My main conclusion is that Maclaren-Ross might have suited a shorter biography, more a character sketch, than a full biography.

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ah, I love the obscure writer - especially if he's a dandy and lived and had fun in Soho London during the 50's. A strange man who owed everyone money and yet, lived like the prince of Soho.

I don't think he's the lost great novelist, but he's an interesting and mostly forgotten literary British i.e. London figure.

[Donald Phillips · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is way too long. Accepting that JM-R had money problems lops off 100 pages. His publishing travails consume another 100 pages. J M-R comes off as latter day Wyndham Lewis: a talented albeit creepy character.

[Fionaonaona · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paul Willetts deserves five stars for this extremely well-researched biography.

[Ben Gee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book but I do agree, it was too long. I found myself getting frustrated during the later half of the book at the constant albeit sad financial struggle JMR suffered with endless rent evictions, mounting arrears and creditors chasing him. There ensued a constant battle with JMR attempting to avoid poverty by making various publishing promises he invariably failed to commit to. Do I feel I got to know the real JMR? It's hard to tell but this book did wonderfully capture the whole Fitzrovia, Soho bohemian world of the forties and fifties and really evoke the smoky atmosphere of the pubs and clubs and the characters that frequented them.

[Tali · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best biography I ever read, not a book that can be put down.
It brings to life one of the most interesting characters, a great writer, in one of the most prolific and exiting times of English literature.
Willetts’s clear and flowing prose is a pleasure to read.
Really loved it.

[Shane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pretty fab up to now. I'm up to the part where he's just been dischagred from the army and is spending his time in pubs of wartime Soho. All very bohemian and a bit grubby.