Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia - Paul Willetts

 Julian Maclaren-Ross (1912-64) was a gifted but prodigal writer across most genres who could never keep hold of a pound note and who drank himself to an early death in the postwar pubs of northern Soho or, the catchier version, Fitzrovia.   He was close to Dylan Thomas when they worked together for a documentary film company in the later years of WW2.   He knew and drank with Nina Hamnett (see my review of her Laughing Torso), collaborated on a movie script with my favourite forgotten British sci-fi writer Charles Eric Maine, and is remembered chiefly for his posthumously published Memoirs of the Forties (also reviewed here), which is the key text for any student of British arts in the Twentieth Century. 

This, by Paul Willetts, is the only full-length biography.   The research is impressive - the cover is very good - the editing is not.   Whilst it is clear that JML led a peripatetic life and tried to hide his whereabouts from his legion of creditors, there is far too much made of his ever-changing address and, in the final chapters, when either Willetts or his editors were running out of vigilance, it is way too often accompanied by terms like 'about November' which is a nonsensical phrase, easily improved.   As it is, it hits like a cracked church bell striking midnight - over and over and over in the final chapters.   I would also suggest there are insufficient examples of our hero's writing to justify the claims made for his talent (which I agree with, by the way, having read his Memoirs more than once).

So, could have been better, but nevertheless Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia is worth having and well worth reading.   A genuine window into a vanished world.

The Devil in the Flesh - Raymond Radiguet

The ultimate, the original enfant terrible and muse to Jean Cocteau, Raymond Radiguet published this roman a clef when he was still a teenager.  His hero in the book (unnamed) is fifteen years old when he seduces nineteen-year-old Marthe.  Marthe is engaged to a soldier on the Front (this is the last year or so of World War I), and the protagonist lets the marriage go ahead.  But as soon as Jacques is back on the front line our 'hero' is spending his nights and much of his days at the marital home.  Marthe loves him dearly.  He is too young for such considerations.  For him, it is all about the coup, the exercise of control over a lesser being.  The book came out in 1923, around the time Radiguet turned twenty.  It was a scandal and a sensation.  Of course everyone assumed it was autobiographical, which it may well have been; of course Radiguet did nothing to clear up the matter.  The outcry was not so much the seduction as the implication that the wives of France's heroes might not have been entirely faithful during their long absence.

Radiguet wrote a play and one more novel - Count Orgel's Ball, which is much harder to get hold of. He was still only twenty when he died in December 1923.  Cocteau was inconsolable - for a while.  Nina Hamnett (see below), who knew them both from Bohemian nights at the Boeuf sur le toit, attended the funeral.

The book remains extraordinarily powerful.  The translation in the Penguin Classic version, by A M Sheridan Smith, is extremely readable.

Laughing Torso - Nina Hamnett

 

Nina Hamnett was a wild child of the nineteens and twenties.  Posh but not rich, she escaped from rural Wales to London where she studied, on and off, to be a painter - and from London to Paris before and after the War, where she slept with a variety of painters, did a lot of drawing, and sold the odd painting to keep the wolf from the door.

They are all here - Modigliani looms large, Brancusi, Cocteau and Radiguet,  Hamnett drops the big names like small bombs.  She introduces Valentino to James Joyce.  Some names are evidently so big that she has to refer to them as A or Countess B.  It's a whirlwind of parties and balls and cabarets, liberally sprinkled with nude dancing.  Hamnett does not judge and doesn't care how you might judge her.

There is no real structure to the narrative.  She tries to be chronological but frequently fails.  It doesn't matter.  This is gossip and tittletattle in a breathless rush.  And she's really good at it.  She brings exotic scenes alive and makes highly-strung artists instantly human.  Laughing Torso provoked outrage and glee when it was published in 1932.  Aleister Crowley tried to sue; he failed but he needed publicity more than he needed cash.

There is a sequel, Is She a Lady?, which came out in 1955, the year before she fell (or threw herself) out of the window of her flat in Paddington.  I will have to track it down.

There is no better account than Hamnett's of Bohemianism of the period on both sides of the Channel.  As a painter, there is no better portrait of W H Davies, the 'Supertramp', than hers.