London Calling Read Online Free PDF Page B

His
     friend Anthony Powell, then on the
Times Literary Supplement
, gave him a regular supply of book reviews and ‘middles’ to write, which kept him going, and later, when Powell moved to
Punch
, he employed Maclaren-Ross to write literary parodies. Powell used Maclaren-Ross as X. Trapnell in
A Dance to the Music of Time
, now probably the main reason why people remember his name. Anthony Carson called him Winshaw in
Carson Was Here
and he appears in many memoirs of the period. Dan Davin wrote: ‘To be a friend of his meant not being a friend of a good
     many other people. He was arrogant and exacting in company. He did not like to take his turn in conversation; or rather, when
     he took his turn he did not let it go.’ 10
    Maclaren-Ross’s snobbery and pretensions meant that the moment he had any money he would move into a suite at the Imperial
     or some other luxury hotel with no thought that in a week the money would run out and he would find himself on a park bench,
     a friend’s couch, or railway station concourse – he regarded Marylebone station waiting room as the most comfortable. He felt
     the same way about the newly established National Health System, preferring to owe money to a private doctor, and to have
     applied for unemployment money was not even considered. He was constantly on the move, pursued by irate landladies, hoteliers,
     bailiffs and tax collectors, rarely staying morethan a week in a rented room before declaring that he had no money. It then took two weeks to legally evict him, during which
     time he sought his next accommodation. Some landladies fell for his hard-luck stories and extended him credit; one, who had
     finally to set the law on him, allowed him to run up an enormous rent arrears, £100 of it being paid off by the Royal Literary
     Fund, which paid the landlady directly knowing that she stood little chance of seeing it if they made the cheque out to Maclaren-Ross.
    Despite his boorish and imperious manner, Maclaren-Ross could also be very funny. Wrey Gardiner, publisher of the Grey Walls
     Press, recalled:
    Maclaren-Ross is tall, handsome and amusing. He came into the back of Subra’s bookshop the other day showing me round an imaginary
     exhibition of new painting. ‘Board with Nails,’ ‘Apotheosis’, ‘Coming of Spring’ – a bucket and brush, pointing all the time
     to real articles in the room. The painter, he said, was one Chrim. He will be immortal. 11
    Though he regarded the fifties as ‘a decade which I could well have done without’, it did produce one of Maclaren-Ross’s more
     highly regarded books,
The Weeping and the Laughter
. But mostly it was a period spent in decline; he never stayed anywhere more than a few weeks before running out on the rent,
     dodging the bailiffs, living off a constant stream of advances for BBC radio scripts, talks, and parodies or articles and
     commissions that he rarely completed, all the while berating his long-suffering publishers and the producers at the BBC who
     had bent the rules for him.
    The BBC Third Programme was the great unsung saviour of British bohemia. It came into existence in September 1946, directly
     after the war. Designed to propagate culture in its highest forms, it immediately became a major, and sometimes the only,
     source of funds for poets, playwrights, essayists, composers, short-story writers and public speakers. In his book
In Anger
the historian Robert Hewison identified a ‘BBC Bohemia’ but the majority of its inhabitants did not live in London; like
     an American ‘commuter campus’, it was a commuter bohemia. This was truly ‘London calling’. They included Hugh MacDiarmid,
     who lived in Scotland; Dylan Thomas, who spent most of his time in Wales when not touring America; W. H. Auden, who visited
     from New York; Laurie Lee, who lived in the Cotswolds; Robert Graves visiting from Majorca and Lawrence Durrell from Corfu;
     the travel writer Rose Macaulay; and a few London residents