John Lodwick, a Forgotten Novelist: Covers and Reviews

A look this week at the many novels of John Lodwick, a prolific writer who died at 43 from injuries after an auto accident in 1959. Anthony Burgess once said he started writing with the ambition of being “the next John Lodwick,” given that Lodwick’s mastery of the English language, in Burgess’s estimation, “matches Evelyn Waugh’s.”

John St. John provides a good synopsis of Lodwick’s career in William Heinemann: a Century of Publishing, 1890-1990, his history of the writer’s principal publisher, :

For most of his life he lived violently. He began the war by enrolling in the French Foreign Legion and after being imprisoned on a charge of mutiny and fighting for the Legion in its retreat near Paris he was captured, escaped, and arrested again as a bicycle thief. Eventually he found his way back to England and became a special agent. In all he was imprisoned over a dozen times – all this and much more was recorded in his reminiscences Bid the Soldiers Shoot (1958). The war over, he became involved with smuggling rackets. He had several wives who gave him several children. Latterly he lived in Barcelona, was usually having to write too fast so as to keep his creditors at bay, and there were continual crises interspersed with drinking bouts. In 1959 he died violently in early middle age as the result of a car crash in Spain.

After a failed start as a cadet in the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, Lodwick bummed around Europe and was sleeping in a friend’s car on the Riviera when he decided to join the French Foreign Legion after the outbreak of World War Two. Captured by the Germans, he managed to escape and return to England via Spain, a country he later adopted as his second home.

Lodwick joined the Special Operations Executive, where he had a dramatic career, parachuting eight times into occupied France and twice into Crete, escaping (again) from a German prison camp, and serving as a liaison with resistance groups in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. His commander, however, later described Lodwick as “plausible, well-spoken but unscrupulous…only interested in his own skin and any woman he might admire.”

• Running to Paradise (1943)

Between returning to England and joining the S.O.E., Lodwick managed to write his first novel. It won Dodd, Mead’s award for best war novel, but could just as easily have been considered an autobiography, drawn heavily from Lodwick’s time in France after its fall in 1940. Its central figure, an Englishman by the name of Adrian Dormant, was a fictional alter ego who would appear again in a half-dozen or more of Lodwick’s later books. John Hampson described Dormant as “a consciously unheroic figure, with a prodigious fondness for liquor.”

L. P. Hartley admired Lodwick’s “Elizabethan relish for horrors; down to the last bloody detail he describes them with enormous zest and with a great wealth of literary allusion.” And the book was certainly a departure from the stiff upper lip-ishness of most British first-person accounts of the war published up to then: “We are supposedly democrats. A horse can shit upon the floor, a cow can contain itself, and a staff officer, tarvelling in a private carriage, has usually an equally private water-closet. But the poor bloody private, torn between modesty and necessity, must get out and do it on the sleepers at every halt.”

John Chamberlain’s New York Times review, however, foretold some of the problems that would dog Lodwick’s work: “a first-rate representation of chaos. But the essence of chaos can be reproduced as effectively in ten pages as in 381.”

• Myrmyda: A Novel of the Aegean (1946)

Elizabeth Bowen wrote of the book: “I was interested, from the first page on, not only by the story-telling, but by the spirit behind it — curiously disspasionate, disinfected, and pure, to the point of coldness, of sentiment. This is definitely a novel, not simply reportage.”

• Twenty East of Greenwich, or A Barnum Among the Robespierres

Another adaptation from Lodwick’s wartime experiences, this time about a British officer trapped with a band of Chetniks in Communist-dominated Yugoslavia at the end of the war. It seems to be an odd mix based on one review’s description: “Throat-cutting and torture are the commonplaces of this adventure, yet it is all very gay — cynical and casual, with sprightly back-chat and a constant run of surprises.”

• Peal of Ordnance (1947)

Long before the condition had a name and acronym, Lodwick wrote this satiric portrait of post-traumatic stress disorder. A Royal Engineers sergeant trained in the use of high explosives suffers from amnesia and finds himself applying those skills to manic purpose in peacetime, blowing up, among other things, the Albert Memoirial and a B.B.C. studio. “Mr. Lodwick has managed his fresh and lively story very well, and for all the fun his moral is not lost,” wrote Kate O’Brien in The Spectator.

• Brother Death (1948)

Walter Allen called this a “psychological thriller reduced to absurdity, compounded of equal parts Graham Greene and Hemingway, but concluded dismissively, “I do not know Mr. Lodwick’s earlier novels, but it is only charity to assume they are better than this.” Vernon Fane in The Observer, however, found it chilling: “Not to be recommended to insomniacs.” Michael Moorcock later called it Lodwick’s most original and ambitious thriller, a mix of Greene and Hitchcock.

Brother Death has been reissued by Valancourt.

• Something in the Heart (1948)

Olivia Manning called it an “ephemeral entertainment, but, as such, very entertaining indeed,” though she chastised Lodwick for referring to a husband and wife as “man and superior domestic servant.”

• First Steps Inside the Zoo (1950)

Antonia White may have thought she was finishing off the book with her review, but any lover of oddball novels couldn’t help but be intrigued by her assessment:

One of those rather tiresome books about crooks, perverts, nymphomaniacs and sadistic millionaires which set out to be desparately tough and cynical but frequently trip up into embarassing sentimentality. At any moment the author is apt to become almost spinsterishly coy as when, having taken a medically realistic line about all physical functions, he suddenly referes archly to a kitten’s penny-spending tray.’ Nevertheless Mr. Lodwick can be amusing, he can create an atmosphere, he can describe odd and louche characters and he can tell a story. If some shock treatment could deprive him of all memory of Hemingway, Norman Douglas and early Huxley, he might become something on his own.

• Stamp Me Mortal (1950)

Marghanita Laski felt that Lodwick undermined himself in this story about a failed romance between an English widower and a younger French woman: “As though to disguise his extremely serious intention, the author punctuates the narrative with his own form of humour; at its best this is bitter and stimulating, at its worst it is vulgar and facetious.”

• Love Bade Me Welcome (152)

L. A. G. Strong (himself now a forgotten novelist) was quite impressed, called it Lodwick’s best book to date: “It is more mature, more economical, surer in movement and purpose and, form the technical point of view, quite dazzling.” Strong felt that the only thing that kept Lodwick from becoming a great writer was “the compulsion of a major occasion” — something that would call “for that simplicity of response which could unify his great gifts.”

• Somewhere a Voice is Calling (1953)

Several considered this Lodwick’s best book. In her reader’s report for Heinemann, Rebecca West wrote:

This man is a distressing creature. He upset me when he came here, because he was so like one of my traitors: not that I suspect him of any treachery, it is the abstract treachery to candour, the mere doing of things furtively and against the common understanding of the world, which covers people with a Graham Greene mould. If you get rid of candour you disorient people, they go off to the wrong point of the compass with an air of infinite cunning and superiority to the people who are outside the frame, and it all means nothing…. The queer thing about this book is that it is spiritually homosexual…. He is the spinsterish female who wants a big he-man mate who rapes the other girls right and left and drinks everyone else under the table. She adores this mate, and hates the other girls who get raped, and goes and settles things with the people who are involved in his drunken scenes.

Yet she also summed up the book by writing, “How much more interesting than nearly all his contemporaries. How beautifully suppled his writing. He folds a sentence round a fact or a thought as the girl in the shop ties a scarf round your neck and you can’t do it at home in the same way, not ever.”

In a reverse of his previous judgment about Lodwick’s work, Walter Allen wrote that the book “has given me more immediate pleasure than any new English novel I have read for several months.” In particular, he enjoyed Lodwick’s extravagance of language: “His is not afraid of lyricism or even of the purple patch; and how pleasant this is when so many novelists handle their typewriters with the caution usually reserved for tommy-guns and dare nothing more than the short sharp burst. Mr. Lodwick uses words as though he loves them.”

• The Butterfly Net (1954)

Angus Wilson appreciated the book’s “deserved eulogy of Mr. Curtis Brown” but not Lodwick’s views on the Society of Authors. He clearly identified the book as “a sort of roman a clef that was sort of a cipher for the reader to crack. Kingsley Amis enjoyed the book more, though he felt it was “no more than a clothes-line on which are hung successions of incredible garrulities about literary fiddling and deviling, sins of various dimensions, Stendhal, the heating arrangements in hell, and kindred matters.” He did spot a key parallel between Lodwick and his protagonist (Adrian Dormant again): “Dormant never writes more than the one draft; Mr. Lodwick, one suspects, has pursued the same policy here.”

In the book, Lodwick describes an incident that he was involved in at Heinemann’s offices at 99 Great Russell Street:

On his last visit to his publisher, about eighteen months previously. Dormant had arrived carrying an unwrapped bottle ofwhisky. Bound, eventually, for a party, he had just purchased this bottle at a vintner’s, three doors away. So frigid, so comminatory had been the stares of the ladies in charge of the reception desk at that epoch, that Dormant had not dared to proceed upstairs with alcohol in his hands. He had concealed his bottle in the’interior of the grandfather clock. On leaving the building, he had forgotten to retrieve it, and when about three hours later, he had been smitten with a vague consciousness that something was missing, had not considered it wise to return and retrieve his property. Dormant now opened the grandfather clock, but only dust and the great pendant bollocks of the mechanism were to be seen.

Though Lodwick was vocal in his complaints about how Heinemann treated him, particularly about their reluctance to be overly generous with advances, the publisher showed remarkable loyalty despite his foibles. James Michie recalled that he and fellow editor Roland Gant:

Admired his writing, which we felt was something special, though also remarkably careless. He never became a really important writer, maybe because of so many Spanish wine stains on the manuscript. He possessed overwhelming charm and rascality of the good sort. He once told me that he liked the wicked gleam in my spectacles.

• The Starless Night (1955)

A sequel to Somewhere a Voice is Calling, Julian Symons called it his best book, though he also found “something unsatisfactory in Lodwick’s writing, a sense of chaos and incompleteness, a certain contempt for the medium.”

Walter Allen later wrote of the two novels:

[Lodwick’s] character Desmond Thornton, the hero of the two related novels, Somewhere a Voice Is Calling (1953) and The Starless Night (1955), which seem to me to show Lodwick at his best, says of himself, “I was a stupid little boy, and I had just two gears: the tough and sentimental.” Lodwick had the same two gears, but also an extraordinarily sensitive understanding of the tough, of men like Thornton, a minor consular official in Spain who is always in trouble because violent action is his only means of expression. Thornton is a former Commando, and he emerges as a striking representation of a type common to all classes and cultural levels, the self-imprisoned man who can resolve the problems that beset him only through violence, the man for whom war is the ideal condition because in war his normally anti-social behaviour receives social sanction.

He writes with great panache, afraid neither of lyricism nor of the purple passage. His use of metaphor is especially skilful, and he uses it particularly to describe and reveal his characters and their behaviour, thereby opening them up, enlarging them, giving them at times something like universality. The final effect of these novels of action, mannered, sophisti- cated, lyrical as they are, is elegiac.

John Davenport was exuberant in his praise of The Starless Night: “What a pleasure to have to ride on a dark horse! Mr. John Lodwick is one of the few true craftsmen writing in English. He is so very civilised, his dialogue and backgrounds are so very good, that he is always a joy to read…. All his sensibility goes into action, and who cannot find that a relief?”

• Contagion in This World (1956)

A timely story: plague and quarantine in Cadiz. Vernon Fane found it “His best novel for some time, and his best is very good indeed, the characterisation firm, the dialogue crisp, the sense of place meticulous.” But he also noted what was perhaps Lodwick’s fatal flaw as a writer: “There is a sort of Balzacian impatience about him, as though he were already itching to go on with the next novel.” One could comment that Balzac’s is a fine brand of impatience, but one has to acknowledge that it led the book to fall short of Camus’s account of a similar situation in The Plague. But Lodwick still had his supporters, including Mervyn Jones, who urged in the Blackpool Tribune, “Don’t put down that pen, Mr. Lodwick!”

• Equator (1957)

Set on an island in a lake in Central Africa held by a Spanish madman and fought over by the British, French and Belgians. Pamela Hansford Johnson’s review deserved a flashing “Spoiler Alert” sign: “This seems to me the warmest and most magnanimous novel Mr. Lodwick has written, but I could wish the tone of his satire were less uneasy. Just as he is successfully inducing us to laugh the other side of our faces, he wrecks the mood by having his hero eaten by a crocodile.”

• Bid the Soldiers Shoot (1958)

In his last book published before his death, Lodwick revisits his war experiences again without the pretense of fiction. V. S. Naipaul called it, “First-class entertainment, packed with incident and with a cast of hundreds.” H. D. Ziman, writing in the Daily Telegraph, noted that there had already been a fair number of books written about the exploits of the S. O. E. and various resistance movements, but that, “What is unusual about Mr. Lodwick’s account is the sheet zest, the frankness about misjudgments and blunders, the emphasis on the comice rather than the tragic element.” “Yet,” Ziman added, “again and again something occurs … which reveals … not merely a resourceful tough-neck, but a man of profound feeling.”

• The Asparagus Trench (1960)

Jeremy Brook, in his Observer review, wrote that “Had Lodwick lived to complete the book there can be little doubt that it would have been one of the most distinguished autobiographies to have been published in many years. But the fragment we have can stand alone: perfect in form, tantalisingly allusive, full of youth’s irrecoverable imaginative vitality, and as passionately concerned with what lies below the surface of life as it is witty about the surface itself.” Hugh Siriol-Jones was similarly enthusiastic: “There is no book better for a cold winter evening,” he wrote in The Tatler and Bystander. “This brief, gay and touching book is both bentle and sharp-edged and takes its athor through his childhood and early days at school (a strange and wholly separate world, full of weird projects and maquis activity, wonderfully conveyed).”

• The Moon Through a Dusty Window (1960)

This posthumous novel is narrated by a character one can imagine as one of Lodwick’s favorite drinking buddies:

My friend, I come from treaty ports, from enclaves, from halfa dozen small and accommodating states, including our delightful little neighbour, Andorra, which lies like a thin-shelled almond between the powerful nutcracker jaws of France and Spain. I come from every airfield where the police are slack, and from every quay where there is a small and unsupervised crane.

In the Guardian, Anne Duchene dismissed the book as “roccoco rigmarole about various English outcasts … incapable of anything but corrosive lucidity in conversation.”

With the exception of a breezy history of the S.O.E. and the Valancourt reissue of Brother Death, Lodwick’s books have been out of print for decades. As Geoffrey Elliott writes in his 2017 biography, A Forgotten Man: The Life and Death of John Lodwick, there has been little interest in revisiting Lodwick’s work:

Someone asked me, out of the blue, why I thought John Lodwick was ‘important.’ Taking the word as most people understand it he probably wasn’t.

The answer is simple: because he was such an interesting character, cut from a very different cloth.

When Elliott’s biography was published, D. J. Taylor wrote in The Spectator,

One fail-safe test of a writer’s reputation is to see how many times his or her books get taken out of the London Library. Here, alas, John Lodwick scores particularly badly. If The Butterfly Net (“filled with a lot of booksy talk and worldly philosophising,” Angus Wilson pronounced in 1954) has run to all of five borrowers in the last five years, then The Starless Night (1955) seems not to have left the shelves since 1991. All this suggests that the title of Geoffrey Elliott’s valiant attempt to reconstruct Lodwick’s lost, vagrant and sometimes violent life is painfully accurate.

Based on the above survey of Lodwick’s work and the assessments of contemporary reviewers, however, I can’t help but feel that John Lodwick’s work deserves a second look.