A bit of a smash in Soho

The legendarily catastrophic life of Julian Maclaren-Ross has tempted biographers before. But the task of pursuing him, like the Hound of Heaven, through the sordid backstreets, rented basements and sodden saloon bars of his progress has always proved too much of a challenge. It is an extraordinary story of profligacy and waste which has been told, up until now, only in a million awed anecdotes and fragmentary glimpses of this Neronian figure. This biography is not quite what one might have hoped for, but I have to take my hat off to Paul Willetts for his sheer industry in following his subject to places where few literary biographers need to tread. It casts a great deal of light on one of the most tantalisingly shadowy of English novelists, and gives him what he thoroughly deserves, a career and an oeuvre.

Maclaren-Ross must be the most thoroughly fictionalised novelist of the last century; he was one of those people like, weirdly, Princess Margaret whose persona was so highly evolved that he could be put into a novel without any exaggeration. Most famously, he is immortalised as X. Trapnel in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, but there he is, unmistakably, in Olivia Manning, Rayner Heppenstall, and lots of completely forgotten books by his acquaintances and friends; he was once bizarrely turned into a badger in a children’s book. It is even possible that Iris Murdoch put him into The Flight from the Enchanter; certainly Maclaren-Ross thought so. He was paranoid from amphetamine abuse, and egomaniacal, true; on the other hand, it must be conceded that they were out to get him.