A STYLISH CURIOSITY
Profile:
Alan Ross, sportsman,
traveller, writer and editor
AT SOME stage in his autobiography, Blindfold Games, Alan Ross tells a tanta- lising, highly charged story of how, when he was 15 and back home in India on a rare visit from Haileybury, he used to play squash with a lithe, honey-coloured Eura- sian girl some years older than himself; and how, when the match was over, she would quite unconcernedly undress in front of him, and allow him to watch her shower before sitting naked in a cane chair smok- ing a cigarette until it was time to get dressed again, and for each of them to go their separate ways. Not surprisingly, perhaps, he brooded about her for years to come, with the particular intensity re- served for the unattained and the might- have-been: it's a very Ross-like incident, embodying several long-standing interests — sport, India, and a cool delight in the vagaries of human behaviour, and sexual behaviour in particular — and told with the verve and sense of style that have disting- uished his career as a writer, as (it seems reasonable to assume) a sportsman, and as the editor of the London Magazine. All this took place back in the 1930s; meeting Alan Ross today, it's hard to remember that he's a man in his mid- sixties, a veteran of the Murmansk convoys and a contemporary at. St John's College, Oxford, of Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, John Wain and Bruce Montgomery. He looks far fitter and less worn than most men in their forties, and displays the enthusiasm and the lack of pomposity of someone half his age; with his darting, hesitant manner and large brown eyes, he is oddly reminiscent of some observant night animal — a humorous and highly articulate lemur, perhaps. (Before he shaved off his nautical beard, he looked surprisingly like a brainier member of the Russian royal family.) At school, he tells us, an incipient dandyism 'took the form of observing the heroes of my adolescence in terms of how they dressed and their mannerisms on the field of play': spotted at work in the unusual offices of the London Magazine, or draining a gin and tonic with bitters instead of a slice of lemon (a trick he learned from Anthony Powell) in one of the agreeable local restaurants to which he is prone, Ross is a stylish and pleasingly raffish figure, clad in a cricketing jersey, a battered suede jacket and elderly stone- coloured cords, or the kind of emphatic tweed jacket one associates with those vanishing souls who share or reflect his liking — first fanned by Yeats Brown's Lives of a Bengal Lancer — for 'writers who were also men of action'.
Alan Ross was born and spent his earliest years in Calcutta: his father was a director of Shaw, Wallace and Co; his mother's family, which had been in India for generations and included an Armenian begum among its members, was afflicted `I'm insider dealing.' by a 'general extravagance and decline' which manifested themselves in drink, `good living, Afghan horse-dealing and women'. Ross's own recollections of India combine the idyllic and clubmanlike, the lush green 'landscapes of innocence' with cigar smoke and the clink of glasses. Packed off to prep school in England at an early age, India embodied a kind of tropic- al paradise lost, in which 'what was most loved and familiar was oceans away, though it was brown hands I craved, and not the alternately distant and crowding affection of parents': it may well be that his long attachment to the country helped to set him at a slight (and entirely beneficial) angle to English society and the self- regarding machinations of London literary life.
In 1932 Ross was moved to a prep school in East Grinstead, spending the holidays with the rector of Ardingly and his family. Both Sussex and its cricketers loom large in his life: Blindfold Games contains a long and eloquent litany of pre-war Sussex players like Maurice Tate and Duleepsinh- ji, and Ross spent as much time as he could as a spectator — and, later, as a member of the county committee on the county ground at Hove. As a keen and proficient schoolboy sportsman with a growing in- terest in modern poetry and painting, he found himself at Haileybury moving to- wards his firmly held belief that 'the development of style in prose and poetry and the perfecting of a stroke at cricket or racquets have much in common'; whereas the average literary man is spectacularly inept on the games field at school, and carries his ancient disdain through into adult life, Ross finds in 'Hammond's off- drive, Stanley Matthews's mesmeric drib- bling, or a racehorse's action' the same aesthetic impulse and delight as that afforded by the poet or the artist.
He went up to Oxford in 1940 to read languages, but spent most of his 18 months there playing cricket and squash, at both sports representing the university. By now his passion for poetry matched his passion for games: uneasily aware that such heroes as Auden or Day Lewis were unlikely to share or approve his interest in sport, let alone his liking for Raffles, the Saint and Bulldog Drummond, whereas a squash partner like J. C. Masterman — a dashing embodiment of the scholar as man of action — would almost certainly prove to be 'anti-modern poetry, anti-aesthete, anti-left-wing', Ross plumped for the mod- erns and left Oxford for the Navy with 'the poems of Louis MacNeice in my pocket'.
He spent the rest of the war in destroyers listening in to enemy radio messages initially on a convoy to Murmansk, where his ship was badly hit and Ross found himself for a time battling the flames alone in the forward part of the ship, waist-deep in water and with sodden corpses under- foot, and later in the North Sea. His experiences at sea formed the subject- matter of his first published poems, in John Lehmann's Penguin New Writing: Lehmann introduced him to the literary world, while trips on leave to the Wheat- sheaf brought him in touch with such Fitzrovian figures as Nina Hamnett and Maclaren Ross (who described how Ross, in his naval uniform, 'peered with un- abashed interest at everybody and every- thing, and took in a great deal'). At the end of the war he was posted to Germany, where a colleague and fellow bridge player was Ronald Chesney, later to win notoriety as a murderer (see Letters, 11 October).
After the war he wrote three Mediterra- nean travel books before going to work for the Observer in 1950. He remained with the paper for more than 20 years initially on the books pages, then as a soccer correspondent (occasionally accom- panied to matches by A. J. Ayer, Goronwy Rees or John Sparrow) and, on Robertson Glasgow's sudden retirement, as the crick- et correspondent. As such, he travelled about the world, writing books on England Test tours of the Caribbean, Australia and South Africa as well as, more recently, a biography of that hero of Sussex and India, Ranjitsinhji. A keen collector of paintings, he bought on an early trip to Australia several works by the then comparatively unknown Russell Drysdale and Sidney Nolan, the subsequent sales of which have enabled him to indulge in his passion for racing (after a long period of self-denial, he is now the owner of two horses, one at least of which has more than earned its keep already). All this time he was writing his own poetry, much of it to do with India, cricket or painting; and in 1961 he took over from Lehmann as editor of the London Magazine — so making for what seems the most enviable of lives, combin- ing editing, writing and a good deal of travelling.
The London Magazine is edited from a converted garden shed behind one of the white stuccoed houses in Thurloe Place, just by South Ken tube station. Ross shares the garden shed with his assistant editor, Christopher Hawtree — previous incum- bents have included Charles Osborne and Hugo Williams — and an entertaining bearded collie which occasionally suffers from raging insomnia despite brisk walks between the office and Ross's house off the Fulham Road. Around the walls are back numbers of the magazine, a painting of a Sussex house, and elegantly erotic draw- ings of the kind that so often feature in the magazine itself. Contributors to the maga- zine will be rewarded with a fairly modest cheque reflecting its fairly modest circula- tion, paperclipped, Spectator-style, to a brand-new copy of the issue in which he or she is appearing: but since Ross is a generous and gregarious man, this may well be augmented with an indiscreet and gossipy lunch at his house or a splendid fish restaurant much frequented by the ladies from Chelsea Cloisters.
New subscribers to the London Maga- zine come in daily, but even with an Arts Council grant survival is a precarious busi- ness. It remains the liveliest and most open-minded literary magazine in the country. Like any editor, Ross has his stable of old favourites, such as Gavin Ewart, Roy Fuller, Peter Vansittart and Julian Symons; but his great qualities as an editor are his healthy suspicion of lit. crit., his sense of style, his openness to the odd and the unfamiliar, his wide range of enthusiasms, and a soft spot for unusual memoirs or slices of autobiography. Re- cent issues of the magazine have featured — among more 'literary' fare — James Kirkup on Japanese lavatories and Charles Sprawson on von Cramm, that most stylish and gentlemanly of tennis players.
A recent anthology published to cele- brate 25 years of Ross's editorship included George Seferis's melancholy return to Smyrna, John Betjeman on club ties, long extracts from the journals of Keith Vaughan, an autobiographical piece by R. K. Narayan, and Edouard Roditi on the Turkish baths of Paris, as well as poems by Auden, MacNeice, Larkin and Plomer and stories by Paul Theroux, Nadine Gordimer and — one of Ross's most admirable enthusiasms — Frank Tuohy; and the London Magazine was among the first to publish work by Jonathan Raban, William Boyd and Graham Swift. Not all Ross's geese are swans, but he remains unusually open to new talent, cutting a dashing, independent swathe between the narrow, rather puritanical world of Eng. Lit. and its disciples in the literary establishment, and the broader world beyond. Nor should his activities as a publisher be forgotten: books no longer appear under his imprint, or that of London Magazine Editions, but in their day they included some fine collections of poetry as well as such characteristic auto- biographies as MacLaren Ross's Memoirs of the Forties and T. C. Worsley's Flannel- led Fool (which several other publishers had turned down for fear of libel). It goes without saying that the magazine is very elegantly produced: Ron Coftley rede- signed the page shortly after Ross took over, and it has remained reassurringly the same ever since.
Not long after the war, Alan Ross and the artist John Minton set out from Eng- land to collect material for the book on Corsica that John Lehmann had commis- sioned. Visiting the lavatory one night in the seedy Paris hotel in which they were staying, Ross heard curious noises coming from the room next door; and since there was a gap between the top of the wall and the ceiling, he stood on the lavatory and peered over. He found himself gazing down at a very fat woman and two middle- aged men; all three of them were stark naked — the night was stiflingly hot — and every now and then one of the middle aged men would lean forward like a small child lunging at an ice-cream cone and take an appreciative lick at the fat lady's bosom as she sauntered by. For the next two or three nights the same curious spectacle repeated itself, with the naked trio going chastely about their business. It's another very Ross-like story, and it is — or so he tells us — as far as he has got with volume two of his autobiography. Those of us who like and admire him can only pine for more; in the meantime, may the good work con- tinue, in the style to which we have grown so gratefully accustomed.
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