Julian MacLaren-Ross

Julian Maclaren-Ross (7 July 1912 – 3 November 1964) was a British novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, screenwriter, and literary critic.

He was born James McLaren Ross in South Norwood, London, in 1912, the youngest of three children.

His middle name McLaren was a tribute to the family's landlady Mrs McLaren, who had helped his mother during his birth.

His mother, Gertrude, was once described as being from an Anglo-Indian family of English blood, and as "a magnificent Indian lady and the obvious source of his male beauty".

His father, John Lambden Ross, came from a prosperous part-Scottish, part-Cuban family that owned a shipping company called the Thistle Line.

Although this family money enabled John Lambden Ross to survive without working, it never afforded his family a high standard of living.

Together with their two children, they lived in a series of rented houses and flats variously in south London, Bognor Regis, and the Southbourne district of Bournemouth.

Lured by the cheaper cost of living, the family moved to the south of France in August 1921.

There, Maclaren-Ross received his only formal education.

At the age of 21 he drifted back to England, determined to make a career as a writer.

With the help of a modest allowance from his grandfather, he initially lived in London, where he first sampled the bohemian world of Soho and Fitzrovia.

In 1936 he married a young actress and moved to rented accommodation in Bognor Regis, but the marriage did not last long.

When his allowance was cut off in 1938, he earned a living as a door-to-door vacuum-cleaner salesman.

He continued to write in his spare-time.

At that time he concentrated on writing radio plays, one of which was broadcast by the BBC.

His breakthrough came in 1940 when Horizon magazine agreed to publish his short story "A Bit of a Smash in Madras".

Shortly after its publication, he was conscripted into the army.

While stationed in a series of English coastal garrisons, he produced a string of satirical short stories about the army.

These appear in Horizon, Penguin New Writing, English Story and the other leading literary magazines of the period, earning him a reputation as one of the rising stars of English writing.

Through the post-war 1940s, by which time he had become a ubiquitous and flamboyant presence in the pubs of Fitzrovia and Soho, he established himself as a respected literary critic, writing for The Times Literary Supplement.

He deserted from the army in January 1943.

Upon being gaoled, he suffered a breakdown.

He was then sent to a military psychiatric hospital in the Northfield district of Birmingham.

After a brief period of imprisonment, he settled in London where he soon found a job as a scriptwriter on government propaganda documentaries, working alongside poet Dylan Thomas.

Meanwhile, in July 1944 Jonathan Cape published Maclaren-Ross's first book, a collection of short stories entitled The Stuff To Give The Troops.

These stories prompted novelist Evelyn Waugh to declare that "Mr Maclaren-Ross's work… shows accomplishment of a rare kind."

He published two more short-story collections, in addition to the novel Of Love and Hunger (1947), which Anthony Powell rated as highly as the work of Patrick Hamilton and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Powell was not alone in admiring Maclaren-Ross's fiction; other prominent fans included Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen, John Lehmann, V. S. Pritchett, Olivia Manning, and John Betjeman, the latter of whom described him as 'one [of] the most gifted writers of his generation".

Maclaren-Ross's career was, however, undermined by his boozy, amphetamine-fuelled, spendthrift way of life.

In search of rapid financial rewards, he devoted more and more time to journalism, screenwriting, and French-into-English translation work.

The mid-1950s represented the low point of his life.

Obsessed by George Orwell's glamorous widow Sonia Orwell, he ended up homeless, sleeping in the waiting-room at Euston station, on underground trains, and on friends' settees.

He also had a brief spell in prison for non-payment of debts.

Still, his resilience and determination enabled him to rebuild his life over the next few years.

Their time in Bournemouth is described in Maclaren-Ross's memoir The Weeping and the Laughter (1953).

In 1958 he married Diana Bromley, Leonard Woolf's rackety bohemian niece.

She gave birth to his only child, Alex.

Maclaren-Ross had by then reinvented himself as a writer of popular BBC radio drama, notably the thriller series Until the Day She Dies, which was broadcast on the Light Programme.

He also began writing a series of reminiscences for the London Magazine.

These were conceived as part of what he called his Memoirs of the Forties.