ROSS, Alan

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Nationality: British. Born: Calcutta, India, 6 May 1922. Education: Haileybury; St. John's College, Oxford. Military Service: Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, 1942–47. Family: Married Jennifer Fry in 1949; one son. Career: Staff member, British Council, 1947–50; staff member, The Observer, London, 1950–71. Since 1961 editor, London Magazine; since 1965 managing director, London Magazine Editions, formerly Alan Ross Publishers, London. Awards: Atlantic-Rockefeller award, 1946. Fellow, Royal Society of Literature, 1971. C.B.E. (Commander, Order of the British Empire), 1982. Address: 4 Elm Park Lane, London S.W.3, England.

Publications

Poetry

Summer Thunder. Oxford, Blackwell, 1941.

The Derelict Day: Poems in Germany. London, Lehmann, 1947.

Something of the Sea: Poems 1942–1952. London, Verschoyle, 1954;Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1955.

To Whom It May Concern: Poems 1952–57. London, Hamish Hamilton, 1958.

African Negatives. London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1962.

North from Sicily: Poems in Italy 1961–64. London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1965.

Poems 1942–67. London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1967.

A Calcutta Grandmother. London, Poem-of-the-Month Club, 1971.

Tropical Ice. London, Covent Garden Press, 1972.

The Taj Express: Poems 1967–1973. London, London Magazine Editions, 1973.

Open Sea. London, London Magazine Editions, 1975.

Death Valley. London, London Magazine Editions, 1980.

Other

Time Was Away: A Notebook in Corsica. London, Lehmann, 1948.

The Forties: A Period Piece. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1950.

The Gulf of Pleasure (travel). London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1951.

Poetry 1945–50. London, Longman, 1951.

The Bandit on the Billiard Table: A Journey through Sardinia. London, Verschoyle, 1954; revised edition, as South to Sardinia, London, Hamish Hamilton, 1960.

Australia 55: A Journal of the M.C.C. Tour (cricket). London, Joseph, 1955.

Cape Summer, and The Australians in England. London, Hamish Hamilton, 1957.

The Onion Man (for children). London, Hamish Hamilton, 1959.

Danger on Glass Island (for children). London, Hamish Hamilton, 1960.

Through the Caribbean: The M.C.C. Tour of the West Indies 1959–1960 (cricket). London, Hamish Hamilton, 1960.

Australia 63 (cricket). London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1963.

The West Indies at Lord's (cricket). London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1963.

The Wreck of Moni (for children). London, Alan Ross, 1965.

A Castle in Sicily (for children). London, Alan Ross, 1966.

Colours of War: War Art 1939–45. London, Cape, 1983.

Ranji, Prince of Cricketers. London, Collins, 1983.

Blindfold Games: An Autobiography. London, Collins Harvill, 1986.

The Emissary: G.D. Birla, Gandhi and Independence. London, Collins Harvill, 1986.

West Indian Summer, with Patrick Eagar. London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1988.

Coastwise Lights (autobiography). London, Collins Harvill, 1988.

After Pusan. London, Harvill, 1995.

Winter Sea: War, Journeys, Writers. London, Harvill, 1997.

Reflections on Blue Water: Journeys in the Gulf of Naples & in the Aeolian Islands. London, Harvill, 1999.

Green Fading into Blue: A Sporting Memoir. London, Deutsch, 1999.

Editor, Selected Poems of John Gay. London, Grey Walls Press, 1950.

Editor, with Jennifer Ross, Borrowed Time: Short Stories, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. London, Grey Walls Press, 1951.

Editor, Abroad: Travel Stories. London, Faber, 1957.

Editor, The Cricketer's Companion. London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1960; revised edition, London, Eyre Methuen, 1979.

Editor, Poetry Supplement. London, Poetry Book Society, 1963.

Editor, London Magazine Stories 1–12. London, London Magazine Editions, 1964–80.

Editor, Leaving School. London, London Magazine Editions, 1966.

Editor, Living in London. London, London Magazine Editions, 1974.

Editor, Selected Poems, by Lawrence Durrell. London, Faber, 1977.

Editor, The Turf. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1982.

Editor, London Magazine 1961–1985. London, Chatto and Windus, 1986.

Editor, Signals: Thirty New Stories to Celebrate Thirty Years of the "London Magazine.' London, Constable, 1991.

Editor, with Jane Rye, Signals-2: 25 London Magazine Stories. London, London Magazine, 1999.

Translator, The Undersea Adventure, by Philippe Diolé. New York, Messner, 1953.

Translator, The Sacred Forest, by Pierre Gaisseau. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1954.

Translator, Seas of Sicily, by Philippe Diolé. London, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1955; as Gates of the Sea, New York, Messner, 1955.

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Manuscript Collection: Arts Council of Great Britain, London.

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Alan Ross began as what is vaguely called a war poet. He was in Germany during the early part of the Allied occupation, and his subjects were German gun sites and military hospitals, day and night in Hamburg, Lüneburg Heath, and the dark night of the soul that, as he saw it, was closing in on Germany. The subjects were grim, but the poet's spirit did not fully reflect them, for his awareness of the sensuous world was too strong. "Lüneburg," for instance, has as its refrain "The courtroom holds the afternoon in chains." The idea is to convey that Germany, too, is in chains, but the verse that follows might reflect a peaceful life in Oxford: "October settles on water and weeping willows. /Under stone bridges, leaves like boats /Drift golden …"

Many years later, when preparing his collected poems, Ross revised many of these early pieces in a remarkable way, stiffening them, making exact what had been vague. "Sengwarden" originally began and ended with the line "At Sengwarden the silence is the space in the heart." (As a young poet Ross had a weakness for this kind of romantic and not very meaningful statement.) This line was dropped, and the revised poem begins,

Something (but what) could be made of this.
Two U-boat officers turning to piss
In swastika shapes against a wall.

These revised early poems, which bear only the relationship of mood to their originals, are certainly among Ross's best work. In general he shows a love of color and gaiety that sometimes declines to mere prettiness. He has written about cricket at Brighton and the World Cup, the Grand Canal and mine dances in Johannesburg, the Autostrada del Sole and the Finchley Road. He records the scene vividly, but too often he seems content just to do this without looking beneath or outside it. His poem about the Finchley Road begins, "Beyond the window the tyre-coloured road deflates /Like a tube at night." One appreciates the ingenious aptness of the image, but it is expressive only on a superficial level. Sometimes a general moral is drawn in the last verse in an attempt to add meaningfulness to a poem that is really no more than a record of observations.

Perhaps Ross was unlucky in the period at which he began writing. His natural tendency to romantic excess was encouraged by World War II and by the poets most in favor at the time. In the 1930s or in the 1950s his tendency to see everything in terms of brightly colored pictures would have been controlled, and this in fact he has tried to do himself. The poems he wrote in Africa between 1958 and 1960 offer pictures just as clear as those in his earlier work, but some of them, like "Rock Paintings," "Sometime Never," and "Such Matters as Rape," go a good deal further by expressing involvement with the scenes described.

Death Valley, the collection of poems written in various parts of the United States, has all of the pictorial sharpness of the early work plus a keenness of observation that is never merely journalistic. This fine volume was rather impercipiently received, however.

—Julian Symons