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John Lodwick

A Dozen Views of the Fall of France, June 1940

I recently spent the equivalent of two days listening to the audiobook version of The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940 William L. Shirer’s massive follow-up to his classic The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. At over 1,000 pages, the book will satisfy all but the most obsessive reader’s appetite for the workings of French politics between 1870 and 1940. And if there is one resounding criticism I’d make, it’s that Shirer’s is very much an old-school history. This is history from the top down, as seen (and then exhaustively recounted in memoirs) by the politicians and generals at the highest levels of the government and military. With few exceptions, we get little sense of how the events of May and June 1940 were experienced by ordinary people.

One reason I find this episode fascinating is that it represented, in a matter of weeks, at times even just days, the complete overturn of the status quo of millions. At every level from the individual to the national, things that were taken for granted were torn away or fell apart. For me at least, I cannot read an account from this time without wondering, What would I have done? How would I have reacted? Would I have acted selflessly or heroically? Or panicked and clogged the roads like thousands of other refugees? I hope I never have to learn that answers to these questions, but here is a selection of 12 different ways in which people responded.

• Divided Loyalties: A Scotswoman in Occupied France, by Janet du Tessier Cros
Janet Griegson was a Scotswoman who married François Teissier du Cros, a physicist, in 1930. She found herself in the rural Cevennes region in southern France with her husband on military service in May 1940. In this memoir of her experiences during the war, she recalls first hearing the news of the invasion:

A little beyond Mandiargues some soldiers stopped the bus and came on board. They told us that their leave had been cancelled because at that very moment the Nazi troops were pouring into Holland. A buzz of dismay went through the bus. i sat frozen. Something in my mind was rushing desperately hither and thither, hunting for a way out. There was none. My sister Alice was married to a Dutchman and lived in The Hague. What would become of their children and of themselves? What about François? It was the end, the terrible end I had sensed from the beginning….

• Death and Tomorrow (American title: The Germans Came to Paris)(1942), by Peter de Polnay
Peter de Polnay, a Hungarian-born novelist who wrote in English, was living in Paris and enjoying the best of la vie bohème when war broke out. He first felt himself outside the conflict, and even the start of the Blitzkrieg seemed, at first, of little import:

I went to play bridge in the house of an English friend, and at that bridge party only English and Americans were present. They all said that the French were running; I heard the word running the whole afternoon. Now that the Germans are inside France, I suggested, the running will stop. The answer was that the Stukas and the seventy-ton tanks were invincible. But there was Weygand [the marshal commanding the French army], I said. It was a pretty gloomy afternoon, though nobody quite believed that those tanks were really invincible, it was talking of the devil in the hope that the talk would exorcise him.

Death and Tomorrow is a vivid description of the first days of the German occupation of Paris, enriched by the fact that de Polnay seemed to cross paths — and be trusted — by everyone: Germans, French, collaborators, black marketeers, and Resistance members. Eventually, though, his freewheeling ways attracted the attention of the Gestapo and he was forced to flee, making his way to England, the story of which comprises the second half of his book.

• The Train, by Georges Simenon
Twenty years after the fact, the prolific novelist Georges Simenon wrote one of his best novels — Brigid Brophy called it his masterpiece — about the choices people make when their lives are suddenly disrupted. The story opens as a Belgian couple are fleeing their home to escape the Germans. Familiar with the experience of occupation from the First World War, some of their fellow townspeople have decided to stay:

Other people, like us, were walking towards the station, burdened with suitcases and bundles. An old woman asked me if she might put hers on my cart, and she started pushing it along with me….

There was a rather wild look in most people’s eyes, but that was chiefly the result of impatience. Everybody wanted to be off. It was all a matter of arriving in time. Everybody was convinced that part of the huge crowd would be left behind and sacrificed.

Were those who were not leaving taking greater risks? Behind the window-panes, faces were watching the fugitives, and it seemed to me, looking at them, that they were stamped with a sort of icy calm.

The couple become separated in the evacuation and the husband meets a Czech woman who leads him to reconsider where he wants to go with his life. It’s a classic Simenon story, in which one unexpected accident, one step in the wrong direction, sets off a series of events that overturns everything an individual has taken for granted — rather as the fall of France did on a much larger scale.

• Running to Paradise (1943) and Bid the Soldiers Shoot (1955), by John Lodwick
Finding himself in France at the outbreak of the war, John Lodwick joined the French Foreign Legion and was involved in numerous skirmishes as the French and British armies gave way before the Germans. He wrote about the experience twice: first as a novel with his fictional counterpart Adrian Dormant and again, 15 years later, in a memoir that encompassed his time as a prisoner of war, his escape to England, and his work as an agent for the Special Operations Executive in France and the Balkans.
Both books demonstrate that Lodwick, for all his superficial nonchalance, was a veteran of intense combats. In Running to Paradise, he describes the psychological effects of being attacked by Stuka dive bombers:

Both the precision of their aim and the destruction caused by it were intense. The effect of it was moral as well as material. A bomb takes a certain time to fall, and whistles as it drops. The blast and danger of its explosion are as nothing compared to the agonized suspense of these few moments. A man lying with his belly married to the soil or in the shallow shelter of some hole, feels himself annihilated in advance, a grubby penny lying on the counter of eternity. He cannot see. He dare not raise his head. He can only hear, and since the enemy realize this and know the control which his auditory system exercises on his nerves, they fit sirens to their aeroplane engines — sirens, whose mournful wail, like the last breath of a banshee, shall deafen him and curdle his quaking tripes.

• F.S.P.: An N.C.O.’s Description of His and Others’ First Six Months of War, January 1st–June 1st, 1940, by Arthur Gwynn-Browne (1941)
Gwynn-Browne was an NCO assigned to a Field Security Post (a military police unit) with the British Expeditionary Force deployed to France after the German invasion of Poland. He witnessed, therefore, not only the truce-like “Phony War” but the panic and retreat when the German Panzers began driving through Belgium and France. Gwynn-Browne’s might be considered the first modernist account of World War Two, as his prose style shows the clear influence of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein.
In the early days, his unit is assigned to try to manage the masses of refugees filling every passable road leading away from the Germans:

There were hundreds of cars, thousands of refugees. They all looked much the same and one car looked much the same as the next one coming after. On the top there were always the mattresses laid flat on the roof and on them lay blankets pillows eiderdowns rug and these were securely corded and then usually a bicycle and a child’s scooter and sometimes a pram securely corded on top of them. It was hot and dry and it was all right, later on it was cold and wet and then it was not so all right. Inside the cars there was everything the family had and all the women inside all wore little round hats with little veils on them. The children usually there were two or three children they were asleep. There were never any pet animals and the windows were tight shut though it was hot but they were closed. Perhaps it is not kind to say they all looked very bourgeois but they did, they were plump scented and stuffy.

• Europe in the Spring, by Clare Boothe (1940)
Playwright and occasional reporter Clare Boothe (not yet adding husband and Time/Life owner Henry Luce’s name to hers) traveled to Europe in April 1940 expecting to travel around and witness the uneasy stalemate underway since the end of the German and Soviet takeover of Poland. Instead, she found herself caught up in the flight from the German attack, waking up on her first day in Brussels to the news that German troops were crossing into Belgium and German planes bombing its cities and forts. She makes her way to Paris, where she watches as the facade of Parisian sophistication crumbles as the government and army fall apart:

Paris got its information about what France had been doing all day, all night, the way a woman gets hers about what her husband has been up to. You know how a woman says, the split second her husband walks in the door with a carefully arranged smile on his face: “So things have been going badly at the office?” And he says: “My God, how did you know?” And she replies: “Because I know you so well, darling.” That is how Paris, the wife, knew what was happening to France, the husband. All the smiles or frowns on the politicians’ faces when they left their offices, the way military moustaches drooped or bristled at midnight, the inflections of well-known voices saying nothing or something or anything on the radio, on the telephone; the way important. people walked in the street; the way ministry doors were slammed; by the significant silences of a great race of talkers; by a thousand little downward percolating uncensorable gestures and indications, the contagious climate of a mood spread from the top of Paris to the bottom—from clerk to doorman, to domestic, to waiter, to policeman, to taxi-driver, to the people—so that the people of Paris knew from hour to hour how the fate of France fared.

• Assignment to Catastrophe, by Major General Edward L. Spears (1955)
Spears, who grew up in France and had the dual advantages of a fluent mastery of the French language and culture and the trust of Winston Churchill, was appointed as Churchill’s personal representative to French prime minister Paul Reynaud soon after Churchill took over as British prime minister. Assignment to Catastrophe, Spears’ two-volume memoir of the lead-up to the war and of the fall of France, is a fascinating account of the personalities and politics at work in the last days of the Fourth Republic.
Knowing Marshal Pétain from his work as a liaison officer between the British and French forces during World War One, Spears paid a call soon after Pétain’s return from his post as ambassador to Franco’s Spain. He soon realized that the man who was being lauded as the savior of France was senile, ineffectual, and completely unsuited to the task:

Very sadly I said: “What France needs today, Monsieur le Marshal, is another Joan of Arc.” His reaction was startling. Once more he was all animation, his face lit up. “Joan of Arc! Joan of Arc!” he exclaimed, “Have you read my speech on Joan of Arc?” “No, Monsieur le Marechal “Now that is too bad, it should have been sent to you. I made it at Rouen; now when was it, in 1937, ’38? It was an extremely fine speech, I may say. I shall read it to you.”

To my amazement, not to say consternation, he went to some bookshelves between two windows, pulled out one or two bound volumes of typescript, did not find what he wanted, then bent right down to look at the lowest shelves. The effort was considerable, he straightened stiffly, and said: “I shall have it found, it is certainly here,” and, moving back to his desk, rang a bell. In a moment his Chief of Staff, General Bineau, appeared. He was almost as old as his chief (age was a major quality in the Marshal’s eyes) and, I think, very lame.

The problem was explained, and with courteous apologetic haste the General began to hunt for the speech.

It was presently found. “ Je vous remercie ,” said the Marshal, as, adjusting his pince-nez once more, he settled himself in a stiff arm¬ chair with his back to the window.

All I remember about that speech was that it was very, very long and that he read it in a monotone. I cannot recall a single sentence, or even its gist. What I do remember was the terrible sadness I felt as I watched him, a sadness now based on pity for a very old man for whom I had, till so recently, felt the deepest affection and regard. He was infinitely pathetic in his childish satisfaction as he read.

• My First War: An Army Officer’s Journal for May 1940, through Belgium to Dunkirk, by Basil Bartlett (1942)
Like Gwynne-Browne, Basil Bartlett was assigned to an FSP with the B.E.F., but in his case as the commanding officer. My First War is a case study in the incoherence of an army and society in collapse. Macmillan tried to market the book as “British nonchalance and dry humor at its most enchanting,” but what comes across more strongly is a world view consistently failing to take in the magnitude and reality of the chaos it was experiencing.
As his unit approaches Dunkirk, Bartlett asks a Belgian for the name of a good hotel there, “as we’re all tired and feel we’d like a wash and a sleep.” The man looks at him in amazement. He soon discovers why:

Dunkirk was a nasty shock. I knew it had been bombed, but I hadn’t realised quite how seriously. As I entered the town there was a roar of engines overhead. I looked up and saw about thirty pale-green aeroplanes with a black cross on their underwings flying very low above me. There were no airraid shelters to be seen. So I dived down a side-street and hid myself under a stone seat. At that moment the bombs began to fall. Each aeroplane dropped a 500-pound screaming bomb. Then they all scattered hundreds of little delayed-action and incendiary bombs. By a miracle I escaped being hit.
I crawled out feeling rather shaken.

• Strange Defeat, by Marc Bloch
Bloch, one of the leading historians of his time as well as a veteran of World War One, wrote a brief account that combined personal memoir with searching political and social criticism that was published after his execution by the Gestapo in 1944 for his work in the French resistance.
Serving as a fuels officer when his unit was cut off by the German assault in early May, Bloch evaded capture for ten days by disguising himself as … himself:

What, in fact, I did, after standing for a few moments deep in thought on the pavement of that hilly street, was to choose what seemed to me then the simplest, and, in the long run, the safest method of getting away. I went back to the house where I was billeted. There I took off my tunic. My rough serge trousers had nothing particularly military about them. From my landlord, who, with his son, showed, on this occasion, a high degree of courage, I got, without difficulty, the loan of a civilian jacket and tie. Then, after first making contact with an old friend who was a professor at Rennes, I booked a room in one of the hotels. Arguing that the best way to escape being noticed was to retain one’s identity, I put my real name and occupation on the form handed tome by the manager. My grey hairs were sufficient guarantee that no one would suspect the presence of an army officer beneath the outward semblance of so obviously academic a figure?

• The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940, by Lion Feuchtwanger (1941)
Novelist Feuchtwanger and his wife left Germany in 1933 after Hitler came to power, knowing that their status as liberal intellectuals and Jews put them at risk of Nazi persecution. Within two weeks of the German invasion of France in May 1940, however, he was told to report to the internment camp at Les Mille. After several months, he managed to arrange his escape from internment, disguising himself as a woman and making it to Marseilles. There, with the help of American consul Varian Fry, the couple were given passage to New York, where Feuchtwanger wrote this account of his treatment by the Germans.
Feutchwanger wrote of the experience of captivity with thousands of other prisoners in Les Mille:

What I found most difficult about the camp was the fact that one could never be alone, that constantly, day and night, every act, every physical function, eating, sleeping, voiding, was performed in the presence of hundreds of men, men who were talking, shouting, moaning, weeping, laughing, feeding, smacking their lips, wiping their mouths, sweating, smelling, snoring. Yes, we did everything in the most public view, and no one seemed to feel the slightest embarrassment.

• The Fall of Paris, by Ilya Ehrenburg
Ehrenburg spent the late thirties as a Soviet correspondent in Paris (and managed to avoid some of the personal and ethical risks of Stalin’s purges). In response to the fall of France, he quickly wrote a lengthy novel that, like Sartre’s Roads to Freedom trilogy, traced the decay and breakdown of French society and the early impact of the Occupation. In it, he describes the despair of Parisians during the first days under Nazi rule:

All this time the Parisians had been staying indoors. They could not get used to the German soldiers in the streets. In the morning Agnés went shopping. The long queue was silent. The people tried not to think about anything. Searching for a pound of potatoes or a bottle of milk helped to distract their minds. If they talked at all it was about relations who had disappeared one had lost a husband, another a son.

Once an old man in a queue exclaimed: “What about France?”

Nobody answered, but everybody thought: “France is also lost.”

• Troubled Sleep, by Jean-Paul Sartre
In the third volume of his unfinished tetralogy about French society from the Munich crisis of 1938 through the fall of France and the Occupation, The Roads to Freedom, Jean-Paul Sartre follows a group of soldiers as they learn of the Armistice and are rounded up and shipped off to German prison camps. He describes a carload of prisoners watching as the French landscape rolls away from them:

Brunet saw a chateau that was not yet within their range of vision, a chateau in a park, white, and flanked by two pointed towers. A small girl in the park, holding a hoop, stared at them with solemn eyes; it was as though all France, an innocent and outmoded France, through those young eyes was watching them pass. Brunet looked at the little girl and thought of Pétain; the train swept across her gaze, across her own future of quiet games and healthy thoughts and trivial worries, on toward fields of potatoes and factories and armament works, on to the dark, real future of a world of men. The prisoners behind Brunet waved their hands; in all the cars Brunet saw hands waving handkerchiefs; but the child made no response, she only stood there clasping her hoop.

John Lodwick, a Forgotten Novelist: Covers and Reviews

John Lodwick (courtesy of Kim Davis and the New York Society Library).

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.