Brother Death

  BROTHER DEATH

  John Lodwick was born at Cheltenham, Gloucestershire in 1916. His father died at sea before his birth, and Lodwick was raised by his mother and grandfather. After spending most of his infancy in India, Lodwick was sent at age 8 to Cheltenham College preparatory school, where he acquired a penchant for British naval history, a hobby that led his guardians to dispatch him into the Royal Navy. He attended the Royal Naval College of Dartmouth, and after spending some time at sea Lodwick left the Navy at age 18 to become a writer. His literary agent, Curtis Brown, encouraged him to experience more of life before attempting to write novels, and he accordingly relocated to Dublin for three years, where he was an advertising agent, journalist, and playwright.

  When the Second World War broke out, Lodwick was living in France, and he immediately volunteered for the French army, serving in the Foreign Legion. His first novel, Running to Paradise (1943), drew on his wartime experiences and won the $1,000 War Novel Prize.

  Between 1943 and 1960, sixteen more novels followed, as well as works of nonfiction and autobiography. Lodwick’s prolific output included war novels, thrillers, adventure novels, and comic fiction; most of his works were published both in both England and America, and many of them were translated into foreign languages. During the 1940s and ’50s, Lodwick was one of the top sellers for publisher William Heinemann on a list that also included Somerset Maugham, J. B. Priestley, and Graham Greene. Critical reactions to Lodwick’s books were mixed. Though reviewers were unanimous in praising his fine style, wit, and sardonic humour, he was sometimes rebuked for the cynical tone of his books and the unpleasantness of his characters. Nonetheless, his many admirers included Maugham, John Betjeman, and Anthony Burgess.

  John Lodwick died at age 43 in 1959 in a car crash in Spain. At the time of his death, he had been working on a volume of autobiography, a fragment of which was published posthumously in 1960 as The Asparagus Trench to rave reviews, with critics agreeing that, had it been completed, it would have ranked as one of the great autobiographies of its time.

  by john lodwick

  fiction

  Running to Paradise (1943)

  Myrmyda (1946)

  Peal of Ordnance (1947)

  Twenty East of Greenwich (1947)

  Something in the Heart (1948)

  Brother Death (1948)

  Just a Song at Twilight (1949)

  First Steps Inside the Zoo (1950)

  Stamp Me Mortal (1950)

  The Cradle of Neptune (1951)

  Love Bade Me Welcome (1952)

  Somewhere a Voice is Calling (1953)

  The Butterfly Net (1954)

  The Starless Night (1955)

  Contagion to this World (1956)

  Equator (1957)

  The Moon through a Dusty Window (1960)

  nonfiction

  The Filibusters (1947)

  The Forbidden Coast (1956)

  Gulbenkian (1958)

  Bid the Soldiers Shoot (1958)

  The Asparagus Trench (1960)

  BROTHER DEATH

  A Novel

  by

  JOHN LODWICK

  With a new introduction by

  CHRIS PETIT

  VALANCOURT BOOKS

  Brother Death by John Lodwick

  First published London: Heinemann, 1948

  First Valancourt Books edition, January 2014

  Copyright © 1948, 1951 by John Lodwick, renewed 1979

  Introduction © 2014 by Chris Petit

  Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

  Publisher & Editor: James D. Jenkins

  20th Century Series Editor: Simon Stern, University of Toronto

  http://www.valancourtbooks.com

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.

  isbn 978-1-939140-85-2 (trade paperback)

  Also available as an electronic book.

  All Valancourt Books publications are printed on acid free paper that meets all ANSI standards for archival quality paper.

  Cover by M. S. Corley

  Set in Dante MT 11/13.5

  INTRODUCTION

  John Lodwick was one of those English adventurers, along with Geoffrey Household and Simon Raven, who could write because they’d had a life before; experience, in a word. Lodwick belonged to a generation both made and ruined by the Second World War, unable to settle after; an ex-public schoolboy (Cheltenham) who had found himself in France where he joined the Foreign Legion, was interned after the German invasion of 1940 but escaped to return after training in England to act as a saboteur behind enemy lines. In his autobiography, Bid the Soldiers Shoot, he introduces himself in typically insouciant terms: “When war broke out, I was living in St. Rémy-de-Provence and, because my money was very low, sleeping in the back of a car belonging to a man called Tintin Blanchin. I was twenty-three years old, and in many ways retarded.”

  He went on to become a best-selling author for Heinemann, producing seventeen novels, drawing from his war experience (including Peal of Ordnance) before embarking on books with mainly foreign and often Iberian settings. Somewhere along the way he became friends with the ostracised Irish writer Francis Stuart, one of the great intransigent authors of the twentieth century. Stuart was in disgrace after abandoning a wife in narrow-minded Ireland and taking up teaching in Nazi Berlin for the duration of the war where he compromised himself broadcasting pro-German propaganda, an act of collaboration that had ended in execution for others. Stuart dedicated his autobiographical masterpiece Black List, Section H to the memory of Lodwick after Lodwick, in a broadminded gesture, had dedicated Somewhere a Voice Is Calling to Stuart.

  The relationship with Stuart suggests a man uncaring of convention and operating outside the usual canons. In fact, Lodwick’s literary efforts were well recognised. John Betjeman praised his richness of invention, debunking wit and a command of words equal to Evelyn Waugh. Anthony Burgess in The Novel Now (1967) put Lodwick in danger of being forgotten following his death in 1959, after a car crash in Spain. Lodwick had positioned himself as a writer deeply embedded in French and Spanish culture, which resulted in a special kind of fiction, “giving a violent English hero—one who could hardly survive a day in suburban Britain—the only kind of background for the release of his passionate talents”. Burgess notes the European quality of Lodwick’s rhetoric, grandiloquence, knowledge of foreign literature and subtle irony, which repelled readers more used to anodyne English fare. The negative review of Brother Death in the Times Literary Supplement in 1948 found parallels to Graham Greene, Conrad and Simenon, only because they operated in what the disdainful critic considered the same dreary territory, where in fact Lodwick was richer in texture than Greene, wilder and more loquacious than Simenon, had something of the cosmopolitanism of Conrad but probably owed more to the restless adventure of Céline, not mentioned by the reviewer but whom Lodwick, given his Francophile persuasion, would almost certainly have read.

  Today Lodwick’s work seems just as informed by the doomed romanticism and dysfunctional anti-heroes of film noir, with its cinematic treatment of landscape and psychological terrain of emotional autism caused when the sanctioned violence of war ceases and becomes institutionalised or domestic. One is reminded of the post-traumatic stress, fugue states and violent eruption of the returning w
ar veteran played by William Bendix in the film of The Blue Dahlia, as well as the compromises of exile and collaboration in Casablanca.

  Lodwick remained his own man, but the writer who cast the longest shadow was Ian Fleming, whose books can be read as exercises in the acclimatisation of violence that left Lodwick’s characters in a more doomed space, Brother Death especially. Fleming’s first Bond novel, Casino Royale, written five years later, laid down the next commercial template, a flattened combination of travel journalism, snobbery and sadism. How damned and stuck (and authentic) Lodwick’s world seems in its grubby dustiness, selling nothing, compared to Fleming’s consummate exercises in branding, anticipating the consumerism of 1960s, where personal choice was not moral decision but an exercise in style, leaving Lodwick’s troubled men looking lost in time. No one asks Bond to murder a child, as they do Lodwick’s anti-hero, Rumbold (such a hobbled, askance name compared to Bond), punished in the end less for his crimes than not knowing his place.

  The story is pretty much a jazz riff—a mercenary adventurer adrift in the back streets of Marseilles, night-life in Madrid, a fatal encounter (a woman, of course), what the Panther paperback calls “a terror-haunted cliff top in the West of England”, pursuit and escape, the enemy within, sickly loathing, drink taken, a hypochondriac lover (“Kill me then. Oh, I don’t care”), the grisliest ménage-à-trois, a sense of inescapable doom and the trap of life snapping shut on a desolate Scottish moor.

  There is a legitimate desire to shock, not just with erudition against provincial Britain (philosophy, art, literature), but in the relentless exposure of hypocrisy and failure of rehabilitation. The plain misanthropy and forensic nastiness seem to come naturally; utterly gripping is Lodwick’s casualness in negotiating the reader into untenable areas. His set pieces are terrific, especially the pivotal one in the Madrid night club. The way he covers his ground is impressive: afternoon brothels, schoolgirls smelling of urine, nuns in railway carriages, and all within a few lines. There are asides on lesbians, art, paintings and even an unexpected reference to Mrs. Gaskell. What Lodwick nails is that bled-dry feeling of post-war exhaustion, its psychosis, misogyny and austerity of emotional impoverishment, without in any way being nostalgic or decadent. He is exactly the kind of writer of whom the late Roberto Bolaño would have approved, as one of the clumsy, poetic questers. His obscurity is a great indicator of the unfairness of what doesn’t get remembered, but if one rightly carries on reading Muriel Spark and Daphne du Maurier then why not John Lodwick, who for all his troubled machismo was also curiously feminine in sensibility.

  Chris Petit

  London

  November 12, 2013

  BROTHER DEATH

  To

  Diana and Alex Bell

  “Let us have a quiet hour,

  Hob-and-Nob with brother Death.”

  Tennyson

  “I describe, not men, but manners; not

  an individual, but a species.”

  Henry Fielding

  One

  Long, long . . . long ago, when he had been aged about ten years, his mother had said to him: “Your father is a brave man although his life has not been happy. There are some things to which honourable men do not stoop, but you, in your time, will stoop to all of them.”

  These words had been spoken in anger, the fruit of some forgotten and childish misdemeanour. Yet in every gust of anger there lies the germ of prophecy. His mother had been right. He had stooped low, indeed.

  Marseilles, the British Consulate in the Rue d’Arcole, the 20th day of December, in the year 1946. Rumbold had come straight to this waiting-room from the Pelican bar.

  Grey the walls of the ante-chamber, and dusty the bookcases with their cargo of geographical magazines, marine text-books, company law. Apart from Rumbold, four persons were present. These were: a Maltese seaman who had lost his ship, and who stood, therefore, in need of cash, two ladies of the governess class, and a time-bedraggled old gentleman—almost certainly a retired major—who perhaps owned a bridge club along the coast.

  These persons did not address each other in any way, nor did they address Rumbold, who, after staring for some moments at a photograph of the late King George V which hung above the mantelpiece, stared at his suède shoes. Meanwhile the old ladies stared at the major, in the belief that they had once seen him emerging drunk from Charley’s Bar in Nice, and the major, who had not seen a real coffee-coloured dago for many years, stared contemptuously at the Maltese seaman, his fingers fumbling as if for some absent horse-whip. The Maltese seaman, conscious of his lowly station, did not stare at all, but instead played with some poker dice which he held in his right hand.

  The door opened: “Mr. Rumbold.”

  Rumbold, who had known that he would be called first, rose casually to his feet. He confronted the furious glances of his fellow-citizens. He followed the clerk.

  “Mr. Pearce will see you now.”

  “Yes, I thought he might,” said Rumbold. He was shown into a large and well furnished office. The Vice-Consul, a tall man still red from his lunch, waved him to a chair.

  “Good afternoon,” said Rumbold affably.

  “Good afternoon. I have now received authority to issue you with a passport.”

  “Yes, I thought you might,” said Rumbold.

  “Here it is,” said the Vice-Consul. He pushed the document across the desk. “You will find it in order,” he said. “The photograph has been inserted and stamped. The visas you must get for yourself . . . that is, if you still intend to travel through Spain.”

  “It is a route to which I am accustomed,” said Rumbold.

  The Vice-Consul played with a paper-knife. “In the passport,” he continued, “there is a slip of paper with an address. I am instructed to tell you that you must report to that address upon arrival in England.”

  “Ah, the pound of flesh,” said Rumbold.

  The Vice-Consul shrugged. “You know best,” he said.

  Rumbold looked at the slip of paper. “You were in the Internment Camp at St. Denis, weren’t you?” he said, suddenly.

  “Yes,” said the Vice-Consul, “I was.”

  “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  “No,” said the Vice-Consul. “I know your face, but the name conveys nothing to me.”

  “It wouldn’t,” said Rumbold. “But you lent me 200 francs in 1940. Here they are.” He tossed the notes across the desk.

  “Well, I’ll take your word for it. Much obliged.”

  “What did they say about me in the cable?” asked Rumbold.

  “They didn’t say anything. They merely instructed me to issue you with a passport.”

  “Very kind of them,” said Rumbold.

  “I should look out if I were you,” said the Vice-Consul. “You’re sailing into tricky waters. Somebody doesn’t care for you. I can tell you that much.”

  “I take great care of myself,” said Rumbold. “That’s why I’m alive to-day.”

  “And prosperous, too, I believe,” said the Vice-Consul.

  “And prosperous, too,” confirmed Rumbold. “You know a lot, don’t you . . . Pearce?”

  “Well, it would be odd if I didn’t,” said the Vice-Consul. “I have lived in this town for twenty-six years, and I have a French wife who is . . . how shall I put it? . . . a good listener in a butcher’s queue.”

  There was a short silence. Both men regarded one another carefully. Then: “I’d better go now,” said Rumbold. “You’ll be wanting to see the major.”

  “Not the major . . . the Maltese,” said the Vice-Consul. “All are equal in the sight of this God.”

  Rumbold rose. “Well, goodbye, Pearce,” he said. “I know you, though you don’t know me. You were the man who stayed here six years ago.”

  “I think you�
��re wise to get out,” said the Vice-Consul. “Over-confidence is fatal. One can print just one meat ticket too many.”

  “How right you are!” said Rumbold. He extended his hand. “Well, goodbye again. I should imagine this is our last meeting.”

  “Yes,” said the Vice-Consul. “I should imagine it is.”

  Rumbold left the office and entered the annexe. With a swivel-movement of his thumb he indicated the invitation of the open door to the dice-juggling Maltese. The major glared. The two ladies cast down their eyes, as they had been taught to do in the days of their lissom youth; in Edwardian times.

  Rumbold was amused to note that a coal-black West African had taken his place beside the major.

  He descended the stairs. In the street, in the Rue d’Arcole, he turned left. He walked with even strides towards the Spanish Consulate.

  “Arriba,” he said, as he stood before the grille.

  “Do not be funny,” said the man behind it. “Your transit visa is here. Where is your passport?” Rumbold handed it over, saw it stamped, and paid. Emerging, he turned right, towards the Portuguese Consulate.