Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dandy in a camel-hair coat, 19 May 2003
This book is an outstanding debut in the genre of biography always a tricky art and made more so by the mysterious and bizzare life led by its subject, Julian Maclaren-Ross. This book is a must read for anyone even remotley interested in the literary history of the 40's. Of which Maclaren-Ross was perhaps its most striking exemplar. Tracing his origins and early life in Nice and later to the South Coast, Bognor Regis where his still in print novel "Of love and Hunger " is set, the story gathers pace at the start of war when Maclaren-Ross came to prominence as a new star in the London Litereary firmament with his short stories, many chronicling his life and expereicnes in the British army. Once discharged form there he headed to London his first proper book deal contracted, he took a flat in Maida Vale and with the publishers advance got himself a stylish dandy's new wardrobe. His daily routine then would consist of propping up the saloon Bar of the Wheatsheaf on Rathbone Place from opening time til 3pm, when pubs shut for 3 hours, back again for the evening stint and later home by last tube or more frequently a taxi to write through the night fuelled on black coffee and benzedrine and later his "green bombs" - much stronger methamphetamine, he procured from a doctor who also drank in the Wheatsheaf. He turned his prodigious talents to writing a whole range of things from novels, short stories radio and film scrpits book reviews and "middles" for the Times Literary Supplement.Using his charm and sartorially elegant appearance to help him live in hotel rooms and bedsits alike. Always in need of cash he often flitted from his hotel room amassing huge bills along the way. Considering he was a conspicuous figure in any setting, Camel hait coat, aviator shades, white corudroy suit, carnation in buttonholem, cigarette holder in mouth with an expensive brand smoking, his silver-topped cane in hand he would talk and drink for hours. He became in later life the model, not always flattering or truthful of other fiction writers characters, most notably as X. Trapnel in "Books do furnish a room" by Anthony Powell a loyal freind and supporter for many years. Once when asked how much he needed as a writer to live on he revealed tha he needed £20 per week, not including rent. He never really made the money by his own admission that he required to live the lifestyle he felt was his by right. He certainly lived the life however staying in The Imperial Hotel as a guest when in cash and sleeping all night in the Turkish Baths beneath when he was on his uppers. A friend and contemporay of Dylan Thomas as well as many of the other leading lights of literary Bohemian London of the forties and fifties, Maclaren-Ross as shown in this marvelously entertaining and funny book, was a man of numerous talents across a wide range of genres, a legendary drinker raconteur and dandy, sometime husband and father, pursued by creditors landladies especially; he often had his mail sent to the George Pub, to avoid those to whom he owed large sums.He was despite being a striking dandy rarely photgraphed so that his creditrs would be unable to identify him.This is a genuine shame as one can not see many pictures of him in this otherwise superlative biography.Writing scripts and reviews would keep him in drink pills and cigatettes and much as was the shared fate of Dylan Thomas his own work took second place to more rapidly remunerated reviews. No story of the life of letters in London of the forties would be complete without the tall figure of Maclaren-Ross drinking and smoking playing Spoof (of which he was a master)this remarkable book gives us a striking portarait of a talented writer and intriguing personality. I would reccommend it wholeheartedly and in the strongest and staunchest terms as a must read book.
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11 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A fabulous book thwarted by publishing negligence?, 4 April 2005
By A Customer
This is a fascinating portrait of the dreadfully dissolute Maclaren-Ross, alas let down by the sort of shabby inattention to detail to which increasing numbers of publishers are prone.The proof reading is ASTONISHINGLY shabby. The odd split infinitive here and there is of course only likely to cause the most blinkered pedant to vent spleen, but when an ordinary reader like me feels the urge to deface a copy of a book, scribbling with apoplectic fury, teeth gnashing and brow furrowing, then there's something amiss. I think the moment I really got upset was when a character managed to change name three times within the space of two pages. This is frankly rotten work; Paul Willetts deserved to be better treated, for, despite all this, this is a splendid biography, as the other reviews will testify. I would recommend this book wholeheartedly (as I do all of Maclaren-Ross's works, redolent as they are of the sort of mid-twentieth century despair, hopes dashed and opportunities missed which would appeal to any fan of authors like Patrick Hamilton) if and only if you don't have a twitchy blue pencil, tut at costermongers' signs, think it's all very well for the national Truss to pen that punctuation guide but really this sort of thing ought to have been taught in schools, and find yourself mumbling about falling standards as you stare at your pint in a tap-room filled with the din of juke boxes and slot machines, dreaming of the long lost glory days which, let's face it, never really existed. But enough. The pose of embittered fogey is an annoyance, I know. Buy it, do, but bear in mind the old cry of caveat emptor.
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7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Long day's journey into (Soho) nightlife, 18 April 2003
Anyone who has enjoyed Knut Hamsun's 'Hunger' or Henry Miller's 'Tropic' series should read this book.
Anyone familiar with Jeffrey Bernard or even the film 'Withnail and I' will be privy to it's classic theme: Starving Artist, fantastic, ultimately unfulfilled promise, a diet of air and amphetamine, 62 hour writing jags, booze as fuel and stylistic prop..As a biography, the Author's first, it's perhaps a little lacking in depth in places. The latter half especially sometimes seems to read as a list of accounts and figures, with little emotional resonance; On one Page Julian has a £108 advance from a publisher and moves into opulent hotel, able at last to focus on the 'Great novel'. By the next page he is skint again, sleeping rough. A £5 cheque from the TLS arrives, he moves into a bedsit. Money runs out, eviction is threatened.
A royalty payment from the BBC arrives just in time..he moves to another hotel..etc etc
Characters are also seemingly wheeled on, named, either insulted by and /or charmed by Julian and wheeled off again with little consequence; again, seemingly more so in the latter half of the book which seems at times to be rushing inexorably toward our hero's conclusion..
(As with any biography, as the remaining pages begin to thin, the reader senses Death hovering in the wings).
This could be partly down to a lack of material available.
Julian was it seems a shadowy figure, especially in the baliff haunted days of his later life. There are also very few photographs of him in existence. It's an odd contradiction that such an 'egotist' was so seemingly camera shy.
Unlike Hunter S Thompson, (Whose 'original' phrase is used within the book's title), an author who as a complete unknown, carbon copied his very earliest letters in anticipation of his eventual fame and their subsequent publication, Julian seems touchingly unaware of his potential place in literary history.
Another thing Julian and Hunter share(Other than the constant wearing of Aviator shades-Julian is surely the pioneer in this department-beating even Elvis as a nightime wearer of sunglasses by two decades)..is copious use of booze and Speed; particulary as an aid to writing.
Julian's Amphetamine habit is never explored enough; scale and length of use and it's apparent impact; on health and character remains largely undefined. But, the book is written with enthusiasim, an obvious love for the subject and at a cracking pace. Having never ead any of Julian Mac-Laren's books, the bulk of which are apparently long out of print..(This Biog does not include a biblography of it's subject's works), I am now on the look-out...
I am now damned to Scanning charity shops, E-bay and book fairs for the works of one more of literature's lost Souls; a burgeoning obsession fueled exclusively by this book; the first and most very probably last account of the life of Julian Mclaren-Ross.
A Writer and a Dandy who was among one the first of the Twentieth centruary's Bohemians.
A writer whose way of living was perhaps the his greatest work of art.
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