Julian Maclaren-Ross died in 1964, in circumstances quite as chaotic as the moth-eaten, bailiff-haunted atmosphere of his novels. Despite occasional murmurs over the intervening 40 years, the real revival of interest in his work began with a 2001 Penguin Modern Classic edition of his South Coast vacuum cleaner salesman epic Of Love and Hunger. There followed a diligent biography by Paul Willetts (Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia, 2003), a volume of selected stories and last year’s Collected Memoirs. Now comes another bumper paperback containing the 30,000-word novella of the title, various scraps of short fiction, a tranche of film criticism and a couple of dozen book reviews, the latter mostly longish ‘middles’ from the immediately post-war Times Literary Supplement.
Brought up on legends of Maclaren-Ross the vagrant but Soho-tethered barfly, scribbling on maniacally into the small hours with the packet of Benzedrine handy at his elbow, I expected Bitten by the Tarantula, a good part of which dates from his Fifties decline, to show a marked falling off from its predecessors. In fact the reverse is the case. Like many people who write to live, Maclaren-Ross wrote too much and too relentlessly. At the same time, obvious hackwork notwithstanding, the knowledge that a neglected commission might make the difference between a week of relative comfort in a cheap hotel and being thrown out into the street gives his work a terrific undercurrent of tension. Even in the literary pieces, several of them dealing with writers long since departed from the public gaze, you sense somehow that the critic is singing for his supper, as it were, writing against time, with one ear cocked for the thump of the creditors’ boots on the stair.
This is literally true of the Eden-era hack; his patron Anthony Powell, then literary editor of Punch, remembered the magazine’s proprietors complaining that their passage through the office door was being obstructed by Maclaren-Ross’s duns.
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