His own worst enemy | 27 July 2017

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 (1916–1959) 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.

Why should this writer, who published nearly a score of well-regarded novels before dying in a Spanish road accident, have fallen so irretrievably off the map? It was Cyril Connolly who remarked that those whom the gods wish to destroy they first endow with promise; and the sparkle of The Cradle of Neptune (1951), an account of a deeply unhappy apprenticeship at Dartmouth Naval College, was there for all to see. Somerset Maugham approved; Anthony Powell, reviewing it for the TLS, allowed the presence of ‘notable gifts’. But there were also complaints about unevenness and imagination taking second place to the roman à clef.

The autobiographical shadings of Lodwick’s oeuvre make regular appearances in A Forgotten Man, if only because so little of his fraught existence is there to be reconstituted. The subject admitted to three marriages (there may well have been four) and while Elliott is on firmish ground with a childhood spent in India and at his grandfather’s house in Cheltenham — Lodwick senior was killed by a German U-boat — a prewar sojourn in Dublin is more or less beyond recovery.