The Library of the Lost: In Search of Forgotten Authors

by Roger Dobson

  There was perhaps another consideration for dropping Clarke. The ‘Novel of the Black Seal’ is located around Wentwood and the Caermaen district: the mise-en-scène of The Great God Pan. A tale involving the Little People would presumably be set in Gwent, and perhaps Machen realised that to involve Clarke in another fantastical romance in the same territory as Pan would not only be artistically awkward but stretch credulity to breaking point. The letter shows he was concerned about the similarity between Pan and the Clarke sequel. Admittedly Dyson in ‘The Shining Pyramid’ (1895) visits the region previously charted in The Three Impostors; though as the ‘Novel of the Black Seal’ is ultimately revealed to be a hoax by Miss Lally, perhaps this coincidence doesn’t really count. (It could be argued that not all her narrative is fictitious: Professor Gregg did disappear. One possibility is that Helen murdered him in order to get her hands on his collection of prehistoric artefacts for Dr Lipsius.)

  The Three Impostors by Arthur Machen, John Lane, 1895.

  One can only regret that Machen does not seem to have left a draft of the original tale. This would probably confirm whether the story was the palimpsest for The Three Impostors or whether it was an abortive separate tale. The letter to Lane may be too early for Machen to be writing the Impostors; though as he states in Things Near & Far he had rescued the ‘Novel of the Dark Valley’ from the destruction wrought upon two books at Turville.5

  To conclude the matter, Machen’s next letter to Lane (3rd February 1894) was published in the Selected Letters:

  I am sending you the pieces I mentioned in my last letter.

  They are all pasted in a scrap-book, and I have ticked with red pencil the stories and articles which seem to me most appropriate for the purpose.

  As a possible alternative to some of them, I also send a MS tale (10,000 words) called ‘The Inmost Light’.6

  It was, of course, ‘The Inmost Light’ which was bound up with Pan when Lane published the book in December 1894. The world had to wait many years before the tales such as ‘The Autophone’, ‘The Lost Club’ and ‘A Double Return’ (all 1890) were collected in book form.

  Other notebook jottings on Machen concern reminiscences by Edgar Jepson as related to Machen’s young friend Colin Summerford, who, according to his diary for 1931, interviewed Jepson on Wednesday, 22nd July. Jepson’s address is given in Colin’s diary as 120 Adelaide Road—perhaps Adelaide Road, Hampstead. Jepson described Machen as ‘a bearded mage in those days [the 1890s] and only shaved when he went on the stage’. Jepson’s Memories of an Edwardian and Neo-Georgian (1937) mirrors the description used here.7 The book contains that astonishing photograph of a heavily bearded, long-haired Machen, reproduced as the frontispiece to Faunus 1 (Spring 1995), the ‘Rasputin’ photograph perhaps it might be termed; though it would have been unwise to use this description in Arthur’s presence.

  Front board of The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light by Arthur Machen, John Lane, 1894.

  Talking to Colin, Jepson referred to the great respect of the Benson company for Machen—Ainley grovelling at his feet’. This was the actor Henry Ainley, whose paths also crossed Algernon Blackwood’s: Mike Ashley’s biography of Blackwood will have a good deal to say on their relationship. Jepson’s comment foreshadows, less politely, his statement in Memories of an Edwardian that ‘so deeply respected a member of that famous company was [Machen] that I have seen Mr Henry Ainley . . . when he was the most attractive jeune premier on the London stage, awed in his presence’.

  Jepson told Colin that all Machen’s inheritance was spent in the last year of Amy’s life in buying drugs to relieve her pain from cancer. One ostensibly puzzling line in the diary refers to Machen developing biceps like those of two navvies. There is a tragic explanation. In the 1980s Colin said that this was through Machen carrying the dying Amy around their flat in Gray’s Inn. Some cryptic references occur in the diary: to what could ‘hill-dog’ refer? Machen taking his bulldog Juggernaut out for long walks while composing The Hill of Dreams perhaps? ‘Monkey play’ probably relates to The Silent Vengeance, Harry Grattan’s melodrama, in which Machen acted at the Gaiety Theatre in 19018. Readers may wish to ponder on one mysterious reference: ‘Olive’s old journalist = Theo.’ Could this be Olive Custance, the poet who married Lord Alfred Douglas?

  Finally, from the cull of those old notebooks, are two fragmentary letters from Machen to the artist and writer Frederick Carter: more fugitives from the Selected Letters. Machen attended an exhibition of Carter’s work at the Leger Gallery, 13 Old Bond Street, W1 and wrote the following to Carter on 15th June 1932:

  My favourite is The Old Actor! I like him very much. He is just the Illustration to the Anecdote Philosophical Inquirer into the Shakespeare Mystery9: ‘Pray, Sir, is it your opinion that . . . er . . . anything . . . has occurred between Hamlet and Ophelia before the curtain rises?’ The Old Actor ‘In my time, sir, invariably.’

  The ‘Old Actor’ portrait of Machen appears in Frederick Carter A.R.E. 1883-1967, A Study of His Etchings, by Richard Grenville Clark.10 At the end of the letter Machen told Carter that ‘when a new and exquisite edition of my books was called for’ Carter alone would be the illustrator: ‘. . . and in the hour of that “when”, I will call for your art’. In another letter Machen told Carter, then living in Liverpool: ‘Do not murmur against Liverpool: you might be forced to live in Manchester!’ We know from The Secret Glory what Machen thought about that grimy industrial behemoth: Panurge is threatened with exile there for his misdemeanours.

  Two engravings of Arthur Machen by Frederick Carter.

  In conclusion, the clear moral of all this rambling Machenalia is that the literary researcher should never dispose of any notebooks, no matter how dog-eared or space-consuming, without examining them. Who knows what revelations may be found within?

  NOTES

  1. R. Thurston Hopkins, ‘A London Phantom’, Appendix D, The Letters of Ernest Dowson, ed. Desmond Flower and Henry Maas, Cassell & Co., 1967, pp. 440-43.

  2. Arthur Machen, Tales of Horror and the Supernatural, Tartarus Press, 1997, p. 259.

  3. The Autobiography of Arthur Machen, The Richards Press, 1951, p. 91.

  4. Winifred Graham (Mrs Theodore Cory), ‘One of the Most Extraordinary Men of His Age’, in Observations Casual and Intimate, Being the Second Volume of That Reminds Me¾, Skeffington and Son, 1947, pp. 74-83.

  5. The Autobiography of Arthur Machen, p. 242.

  6. Arthur Machen: Selected Letters, ed. Roger Dobson, Godfrey Brangham and R. A. Gilbert, The Aquarian Press, 1988, p. 217.

  7. The passage relating to Machen from Jepson’s Memories of an Edwardian was reprinted in Machenstruck: Tributes to the Apostle of Wonder, ed. Mark Valentine and Roger Dobson, Caermaen Books, 1988, p. 5.

  8. For the plot of the melodrama, see Aidan Reynolds and William Charlton, Arthur Machen: A Short Account of His Life and Work, John Baker [Publishers] Ltd for The Richards Press, 1963; Caermaen Books, 1988, p. 86.

  9. Perhaps a pun on A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery (1850) by Mary Ann Atwood (née South). See The Green Round, Ernest Benn, 1933, p. 122, where it is suggested that the Revd Thomas Hampole corresponded with the author.

  10. Reviewed by Mark Valentine in Machenalia, Autumn 1998, pp. 8-9.

  JULIAN MACLAREN-ROSS: THE KING OF FITZROVIA

  Julian MacLaren-Ross, 1912-1964.

  The Lost Club Journal, No. 1, Winter 1999/2000

  pseudonym ‘Ian Armstrong’

  Julian Maclaren-Ross collectors will want to buy The Cost of Letters: A Survey of Literary Living Standards (1998), published by Waterstone’s Booksellers. In 1946 Cyril Connolly, the editor of Horizon, submitted a questionnaire to a selection of leading British authors, seeking their views on such matters as ‘How much do you think a writer needs to live on?’, ‘. . . what do you think is the most suitable second occupation for him?’ (very politically incorrect phraseology these days, but retained in the new book), and whether they had any advi
ce for young people. Now Waterstone’s has repeated the experiment, canvassing the opinions of authors such as A.S. Byatt, Melvyn Bragg, Fay Weldon, Will Self and thirty-eight others, and reprinting fifteen of the original Horizon replies.

  The best contribution, past or present, comes from Maclaren-Ross, the uncrowned king of wartime Fitzrovia, whose Memoirs of the Forties (1965) is an acknowledged classic. He writes: ‘Your questionnaire arrived at an opportune moment, when I was at my wits end to know which way to turn for money. This situation is always arising with me. Hence, my answer to your first question is: A writer needs all he can lay his hands on in order to keep alive.’ He concludes: ‘. . . if I have advice to give to anyone who wants to write for a living, it is this:

  (a) Don’t attempt it.

  (b) If you are crazy enough to try, be tough; get all you can. Price your work high and make them pay. Don’t listen to your publisher’s sob-stories about how little he can afford. He’ll have a country house and polo ponies when you are still borrowing the price of a drink in Fitzrovia. . . .

  ‘And by the same token, please pay promptly for this contribution, because I am broke.’

  Maclaren-Ross would have been amused that The Cost of Letters is published with Arts Council support. His comments on that august body would be priceless.

  Memoirs of the Forties is regrettably out of print, though easily obtainable in its two paperback editions, Penguin (1984) and Sphere/Cardinal (1991). Novelist, short-story writer, bookman, dandy, raconteur, lady’s man, parodist, screenwriter, TV and radio scriptwriter, wartime conscript, Duke of Redonda and incompetent gardener-for-hire in Bognor Regis (he landed in court for uprooting some prize seedlings), Maclaren-Ross was an outstanding talent, and his writing invariably proves a tonic. One need read only the opening page of the Memoirs to realise he was a comic master. He describes the evangelical fanaticism of an instructor during a commercial course in London in 1938: ‘I was there because I had answered an advertisement which began INTELLIGENT MEN WANTED, and found out too late that it meant learning to sell vacuum cleaners.’

  Ross capitalised on this humdrum occupation by writing a novel about the vacuum cleaner trade, Of Love and Hunger (1947). Ironically, and unfairly, he is best known nowadays as the model for X. Trapnel, the unconventional writer in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. Julian’s great friend the writer C.K. Jaeger—a hero of Memoirs of the Forties—was rightly incensed by the scruffy, downbeat presentation of Trapnel’s character in the recent Channel 4 dramatisation of the novel sequence: Ross was famed for his immaculate appearance. (He is unfairly described as ‘raffish’ in The Cost of Letters.) He also appears as Dorian Scott-Chrichton in Rayner Heppenstall’s novel The Lesser Infortune (1953). ‘Work was planned for ten years ahead’ in Scott-Chrichton’s notebook, which sounds characteristic of Ross.

  He was born James McLaren Ross in South Norwood, London, on 7th July 1912. His father John Lambden Ross was of mixed Scottish and Latin American blood, and his mother, from an Anglo-Indian family, has been described as ‘a magnificent Indian lady (Bengali?) and the obvious source of his male beauty’. Maclaren-Ross was largely educated in the South of France, though his charming memoir The Weeping and the Laughter (1953) principally concerns his boyhood in a Bournemouth suburb.

  Maclaren-Ross was discharged from the army in 1943 for being absent without leave: he was found in bed with a girlfriend in North London. He undoubtedly would have been of greater service between the sheets than in helping to win the war against Germany, being something of a military liability. Ross became a fixture at the Wheatsheaf pub in Rathbone Place, Fitzrovia, holding court night after night to a host of mesmerised listeners as he acted out scenes from his favourite films, talked of future writing projects and inveighed against the crimes and shortcomings of publishers. With his teddy-bear overcoat, dark mirror glasses, carnation and gold- or silver-topped cane this Ancient Mariner of the 1940s was a ‘dangerous dandy’, as the New Zealand writer Dan Davin called him.

  Julian Maclaren-Ross, 1940.

  In his essay ‘Good Night, Julian, Everywhere’ (Closing Times, 1975) Davin describes Julian’s regular routine: ‘Midday in the pub till closing time, a late lunch at the Scala restaurant in Charlotte Street, roast beef with as much fat as possible and lashings of horseradish sauce. A stroll to look at the bookshops in Charing Cross Road and to buy Royalty, his special jumbo-sized American cigarettes. Opening time again at the Wheatsheaf till closing time. A hurried dash to the Highlander which closed half an hour later. Back to the Scala for supper and coffee. At midnight the tube home from Goodge Street, where a mad blonde known as the Goodge Street Whore lurked in ambush, convinced he was a homo and therefore a blackleg, and waiting to rave insults until the train bore us away.’

  So bound up was he with his own character that Maclaren-Ross constructed and enlarged on the cult of his personality. He was a monologuist rather than a conversationalist. Davin writes: ‘Julian . . . had never paid lip service to the convention that requires one occasionally to make a show of listening to others.’ Somewhat paranoid, he took refuge in various personae, among whom was Mr Hyde. ‘I am Mr Hyde today,’ the writer Anthony Cronin heard him tell the barman at the Caves de France in Soho. ‘It appeared that he became Mr Hyde when he was feeling particularly vengeful or sinister.’ He told Cronin that Iris Murdoch had used his character in one of her novels: ‘All these young women put me in their books. They think I’m wicked you see. Of course they put me in disguise, but that doesn’t fool me. As you know, Cronin, I’m a master of disguise.’

  The 1940s was the bibulous era of Nina Hamnett, Dylan Thomas, Augustus John and J. Meary Tambimuttu—a time of legends when all manner of writers and artists congregated in the pubs north of Oxford Street, and Fitzrovia flourished for a time as London’s Latin Quartier. Maclaren-Ross became the proud chronicler of this tiny but significant province of Bohemia. It was at this period that Ross was at his most prolific. He published some acclaimed collections of short stories, The Stuff to Give the Troops (1944), Better than a Kick in the Pants (1945), both containing his tales of army life, and The Nine Men of Soho (1946). Influenced by Hemingway, he aimed in his stories to ‘create a completely English equivalent of the American vernacular’.

  He planned a four-part autobiography, ‘Lost Atlantis’, but poverty-stricken for most of his later life he was able to complete only The Weeping and the Laughter—a title, of course, borrowed from Ernest Dowson’s famous ‘Vitae summa brevis . . .’; perhaps, as has been suggested, via Waldo Lydecker’s quoting from the poem in Otto Preminger’s noir classic Laura (1944). His long planned fictional masterpiece, ‘Night’s Black Agents’, never got written. Anthony Cronin, in Dead As Doornails (1976), called him ‘one of the ruined men of Soho’ which the war created: ‘he liked the myth of apparent failure; forms of revenge intrigued him and forms of mysterious return; the ruined gambler with one last throw, the heir who would reappear one stormy night, the Jacobite exile who would live to see the usurpers humbled’.

  Ross describes the classic dilemma of the Fitzrovian writer-boozer in a passage in Memoirs of the Forties explaining how he first met Tambimuttu, the founder and editor of Poetry London, in the Swiss pub in Soho in 1943.

  ‘Only beware of Fitzrovia,’ Tambi said . . . ‘It’s a dangerous place, you must be careful.’

  ‘Fights with knives?’

  ‘No, a worse danger. You might get Sohoitis you know.’

  ‘No I don’t. What is it?’

  ‘If you get Sohoitis,’ Tambi said very seriously, ‘you will stay there always day and night and get no work done ever. You have been warned.’

  ‘Is this Fitzrovia?’

  ‘No, Old Compton Street, Soho. You are safer here.’

  Alan Ross, Maclaren-Ross’s editor on London Magazine, wrote: ‘Soho changed quickly after V.E. Day, its former inhabitants moving out or on, marrying, getting jobs, dying. Julian stayed put, obsolete and friendless.’ Ross was often lonely, apart
from his creditors. Anthony Powell recalls in The Strangers All Are Gone (1982) that in the 1950s, when Ross regularly collected his review copies from the Punch office in Bouverie Street ‘a covey of bailiffs came into being outside, where they hung about ominously on the steps. . . .’