From vacuum-cleaner salesman to wild man of literature, Julian Maclaren-Ross made his fellow bohemian writers appear restrained.
Martin Green considers his memoirs here, while below Joel Taylor assesses his short stories

Collected Memoirs by Julian Maclaren-Ross
Black Spring Press, £8.95
Selected Stories by Julian Maclaren-Ross
Dewi Lewis, £9.99

JULIAN Maclaren-Ross was a highly-praised writer of the post-war years, receiving plaudits from John Betjeman, Evelyn Waugh, Olivia Manning and many others.
Born just before the outbreak of World War I, in suburban London, his father from a wealthy part-Scottish, part-Cuban family, they were able to live comfortably on the paternal grandfather’s investments.
In 1921 they moved to the French Riviera, where Julian was brought up and educated.
Julian moved to England in 1933, living on a grand-parental allowance, determined to become either a painter or a writer, marrying an actress, though their marriage failed after a few months.
Following the termination of his allowance in 1938, he worked as a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman.
At the beginning of World War II he sold a short-story to Horizon and was then conscripted as a clerk into the army, where he felt so frustrated as an office-worker that he went absent-without-leave, which led to being court-martialled before being sent to a psychiatric hospital, and a final discharge from the army.
He came to London in 1943 to set up as a full-time writer, working initially as a script-writer with Dylan Thomas, which was when he established himself as a conspicuous figure in the Wheatsheaf in Rathbone Place.
At the time in London there was a plethora of literary magazines and new publishing houses, eager to publish writers emerging from the war, from which Julian benefited.
He had collections of stories and novels published in quick succession though his life-style, living in expensive hotels, was too much for his literary income, and he frequently had to move to ever cheaper accommodation, for a period living in the Turkish baths. There was never a period of calm or domestic happiness from then on and his dependence on drink and drugs severely affected his mental stability, leading to a period of paranoia and obsessive behaviour.
His health couldn’t withstand the abuse his body had suffered through drink, drugs and nicotine, and he died of a heart-attack in 1964, in the arms of his then girlfriend. Julian’s memoirs are a highly entertaining and self-indulgent account of his life, beginning with his childhood recollection of a Zeppelin flying overhead in World War I when the family were living in Ramsgate.
Here he was introduced to the picture-houses and to romance, falling in love with schoolgirls of his own age. When the family moved to France, they lived initially in Paris, where Julian became fascinated by the theatre, Grand Guignol and a small playhouse with a wide repertoire, which led him to believe that he could become a dramatist. They then moved to the south of France, which was when Julian first attended school, Catholic, run by a strict disciplinarian Monsieur L’Abbe.
Later he spent his adolescence enjoying the Cote d’Azur café-society where he met Frank Harris and other literary figures.
It was then in the early 1930s that Julian decided that he should return to England and start his career as a writer, settling himself in Bognor Regis.
From here he was introduced on visits to London to the pubs and clubs that were alter to become his literary domain.
The allowance vanished and it was then that Julian had to try and make his living by writing, which lead to his hazardous career.
Whatever else throughout his work, there is always a humorous touch that can still charm today’s readers.
n Martin Green was a long-term resident of Camden who grew up in Tottenham Street. He is a poet and writer who had a “nodding acquaintance” with Julian McClaren-Ross in the George Tavern Pub, Fitzrovia.

He was the daddy of all Bohemians

IT was just two weeks ago that broadcaster Jonathan Meades told a packed audience at the Soho Theatre, in Dean Street, it was a bad thing to be too original.
“Julian Maclaren-Ross was too original,” Meades claimed.
“The clever thing is to be original in the way three people had been before, that’s the way to succeed.”
It certainly seems to have an been an affliction that dogged Maclaren-Ross, the archetypal bohemian writer, whose career was cut short by his early death at the age of 52.
But he is enjoying something of a revival with both his Selected Stories and his Collected Memoirs, including the evocative description of his youth, The Weeping and the Laughter, being published in the same month.
The astonishing thing about much of Maclaren-Ross’s writing is how contemporary it feels and it is immensely easy to read.
Quentin Tarantino, when he emerged with Reservoir Dogs in the early 1990s, was celebrated for his talent of recreating quick and lifelike conversation.
But Maclaren-Ross was there 50 years earlier, working within the same literary atmosphere as Dylan Thomas and Graham Greene.
His sentences are long, conversational yet remain fluid. He was a celebrated raconteur and his writing carries the same easy manner.
Consider a description of his Belgian nanny from The Weeping and the Laughter, whom he dubbed Nana.
“She also had a moustache which prickled unpleasantly when she kissed me; this did not happen often, luckily, as all demonstration of affection were kept for public exhibition only: in private our relations were on a strictly practical plane.”
You can almost imagine him retelling the story over several drinks in the Fitzroy Tavern.
Much of his work carries the air of biography, and he wrote in the first person. In his selected stories A Bit of a Smash in Madras recounts a tale of when a drunken Englishman in colonial India swerves to avoid a dog and instead crashes into a couple of “coolies” injuring them severely.
Indeed, so realistic was the work that his publisher believed Maclaren-Ross to have been stationed in India at some time, although he had never travelled there. But in I’m Not Asking You To Buy Maclaren-Ross did hark back to his own experiences of working as a vacuum cleaner salesman. There is much relish in his vivid description of how a savvy old woman, Mrs Crick, tricks a young and naïve worker to not only hand over a new vacuum cleaner but also pass on his last cigarette.
His writing was adored by Anthony Powell, Graham Greene, John Betjeman and Evelyn Waugh. It is about time Maclaren-Ross was appreciated by a wider audience.