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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. ‘Bitten by the Tarantula’, on the other hand, dates from the more or less palmy days of the mid-Forties when its author, like his alter-ego X. Trapnel in Powell’s Books Do Furnish a Room, was being touted around literary London as an up-and-coming young prospect. Here one of Maclaren-Ross’s archetypally improvident bohemian young men, Christopher Barrington-ffoulkes, finds himself in the South of France together with his chum Armstrong, author of a book called Phallic Fetish, staying at the house of a melodramatic dope fiend named ‘Spider’. Gloomily pondering the advantages of marriage to a somewhat dreary-sounding English girl, Barrington-ffoulkes gets involved with a predatory Russian woman, also quartered on the premises, called Mme Mollinov. Later, our now unhappily married narrator reveals, this lady murders her host’s son.
Elsewhere, the mass of short fiction includes one of Maclaren-Ross’s better-known stories, ‘Five Finger Exercises’, in which a painter smoothly seduces a teenage girl, some vivid fragments of army life and a grim vignette (‘Civvy Street’) from the Munich-week labour exchange. The book reviews, if a bit staid now in some of their literary manners, are full of unexpected detours and inspired connections. Anyone, for example, who wants to see what Maclaren-Ross is capable of as a critic should began with the admiring essay on P.G. Wodehouse. This starts with a comparison with Graham Greene, deduces atmospheric similarities with Ivy Compton Burnett and ends by invoking Ronald Firbank (‘who, in his dandyism, his personal eccentricity and rueful approach to life, had certain superficial affinities to Bertie Wooster and other Young Men in Spats, and who, as a writer, was perhaps not so dissimilar from Mr Wodehouse as might be supposed.’)
Finally there are the masterly Punch parodies of, among others, Henry Green, Patrick Hamilton and Raymond Chandler, unusual among work of this kind for the amusement they apparently gave to their subjects (the exception was an outraged H. E. Bates who brought and won a High Court libel action). Reading them one thinks irresistibly of F. R. Leavis, who once declared that parody was to be deplored as it ‘demeaned’ the work thereby lampooned. Well, as the late Sir Kingsley Amis might have said, F. R. Leavis was wrong about that, wasn’t he? This is a peach of a collection, recommended to anyone who found this year’s Booker shortlist just the tiniest bit predictable. Paul Willetts, who introduces the current volume and is almost single-handedly responsible for Maclaren-Ross’s re-emergence into the post-war literary firmament, deserves his customary round of applause.
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