At first glance, Of Love and Hunger, the 1947 novel by Julian Maclaren-Ross, has some resemblance to the work of Patrick Hamilton. There is the South Coast setting, the world of seedy boarding houses, pubs and insecure employment. Against this background there is the doomed love affair, the Mosley supporters, the very specific time of spring and summer 1939, as Britain slides slowly towards the second world war. One can’t help but think of The Slaves of Solitude and Hangover Square.
There are crucial differences, though. The language here is terse and straightforward, a long way from Hamilton’s more ornate style. For example, the verbs are all shortened, “he’d”, “I’d”, and so on, there is a lot of dialogue and a lot of slang; the word “gertcher” appears on the first page. The novel is told in the first person, by the main character, Fanshawe, vacuum-cleaner salesman and aspiring writer, whereas Hamilton always favoured omniscient narration.
Along with the main narrative concerning Fanshawe’s problems with work, money and sex, there is a fascinating second one, a sort of ongoing speculation about what is suitable material for fiction, what can and cannot be put into a novel. Sukie Roper, Fanshawe’s married lover, lends him a copy of The Postman Always Rings Twice, by the American “hard-boiled” writer, James M Cain, and he takes this as his model.
Fanshawe reads a novel set in India and wonders how it would read if it had been written by the author of The Postman. He thinks of his own experiences in India, and this is printed in italics. He reflects: “There was so much now that I could write. Course a lot of it I couldn’t put in.” There are several other passages where thoughts printed in italics represent buried memories, the unpleasant truths that Fanshawe thinks must be held back, both from himself and the page.
While his character wrestles with this problem, Maclaren-Ross himself quietly pushes the boundary of what was acceptable to publishers in 1947. We are in no doubt that Fanshawe masturbates when he thinks about his former lover, or that he thinks the friend of his colleague’s wife is a lesbian, but the language used is so subtle that no censor could have objected.
Sukie reads another book, Auden and Isherwood’s Letters from Iceland, and it is from a poem in that book that the title is taken.
The coda, set in 1943 makes clear that the low-rent pre-war world will have to be replaced by something better after the war. This is another difference to Hangover Square; Maclaren-Ross was looking back at 1939 from a slightly greater distance. This raises the interesting question of just how many Mosley supporters were there in the 1930s, if one uses fiction as the measure. By 1947 it was clear that they had backed the wrong side, so it might have been tempting to make them slightly more prominent than they had been in reality.
I first became aware of Maclaren-Ross in the 1980s when I was reading Anthony Powell, and discovered that he had been the model for Trapnel in the later volumes of Dance. Powell was quite open about this in his memoirs. The only work of Maclaren-Ross’s that I could find at that time was the Penguin edition of Memoirs of the Forties. There was something of a Maclaren-Ross revival in the early years of this century. Paul Willetts’ biography came out in 2003. Of Love and Hunger was reissued by Penguin in 2002 and that is when I first read it. Given the things that have been happening in my own life, it seemed appropriate to re-read it now.
In his memoir, Maclaren-Ross recalled a visit to Graham Greene, at that time living near Clapham Common. Greene was fascinated by the details of the vacuum cleaner trade and amazed to find out that Maclaren-Ross had actually done the job in reality. Was this the inspiration for Wormold’s job in Our Man in Havana?
Powell himself acknowledged that he had used Maclaren-Ross, slightly exaggerated, as the basis for Trapnel. He may also have borrowed an event from this novel. When Fanshawe loses his job, he has to move in a hurry. He is in such a state over the breakdown of his relationship with Sukie, that he forgets all about the manuscript of the novel he has been writing with her encouragement, and leaves it behind in a drawer. Rather more dramatically, in Dance, Pamela Widmerpool hurls Trapnel’s manuscript into the Regent’s Canal.
Finally, where is Of Love and Hunger set? Brighton, Worthing and Littlehampton are mentioned by name, but Bognor isn’t. If my memory is correct, the real life events on which the novel is based took place in Bognor. So, bugger Bognor, indeed.
The Good Reader 