Month: August 2019

Naples ’44 by Norman Lewis

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Is this a travel book or a war memoir? A bit of both, I would say. It was based on Norman Lewis’ diary of his wartime experiences as an intelligence officer in Naples, but was not published until 1978. It is about a very specific time and place but has a hint of the universal about it. It is subtitled “An Intelligence Officer in the Italian Labyrinth”, which sums up the situation the author found himself in nicely.

Lewis arrived as part of the American invasion of southern Italy. The Italians had switched sides and the Germans retreated northwards, leaving the allies in charge of the civilian population of a bomb-shattered Naples and the surrounding area.

Events of jaw-dropping random cruelty and absurdity are recounted. The occupying forces, whether American, British, or Canadian, do not come out of this well. You can imagine what happens when most of the women in the Naples area are near to starvation and will do anything for a meal. An arbitrary rule bans fishing from boats, so the Neapolitans make improvised rafts from anything they can find. Anything that can be eaten, is eaten, such as the rare fish in the public aquarium.

A booby-trap bomb explodes, killing many civilians and giving rise to a rumour that the whole city is riddled with bombs, set to explode when the electricity is switched back on. The entire population is hurriedly evacuated, but it turns out to be a German ruse to spread chaos.

Mysterious tapping sounds in the catacombs suggest that a squad of German soldiers has remained there, ready to come out and commit acts of sabotage; a search reveals nothing, and Lewis thinks that if they were there, they have been spirited away by collaborators.

The former head of the mafia gains a foothold in the new military government which quickly becomes completely corrupt. The American decision to send officers of American-Italian background looks increasingly daft, as it enables the Italian criminal elements to embed themselves.

Almost every sort of item brought in by the Americans is soon available on the thriving black market. Italians caught with illicit items that are freely available on stalls in the street are given hugely disproportionate jail sentences. The criminal gangs behind it all go free. Meanwhile, Canadian army blankets become a form of currency as they can be skilfully tailored into overcoats.

It gets so bad that essential items such as penicillin are soon more readily available on the black market than they are to the occupying forces.

Lewis witnesses the eruption of Vesuvius: “It was the most majestic and terrible sight I have ever seen, or ever expect to see”. A village is engulfed by a slow-moving column of lava, advancing at walking pace down the main street. Eventually it slows to a halt, seemingly stopped by the power of faith, leaving half the village intact.

Naples has been bombed back to the mediaeval era, thinks Lewis, and consequently old beliefs are revived. There are reports of effigies of saints in churches weeping, bleeding and talking. Is this just mass hysteria on the part of the traumatised population?

An attempt to check the spread of sexually transmitted disease is undermined by a corrupt doctor selling false certificates of health to the girls. Lewis reflects that the Italian system encourages corruption because police pay is so low. When he is posted to a village in the zona camorra he realises that it is a way of life, an established system, not quite corruption as it appears to a Briton. In this lawless region, a group of French colonial troops embark on a rampage of brutal sexual assault against the local women. They are dealt with by the men of the camorra in the time-honoured, equally brutal way.

This might sound like a depressing read, but it is not, partly because it is written in such elegant prose that you read on, fascinated. Lewis takes a slightly detached viewpoint, as his job obliged him to do.

Some of the British troops can’t wait to leave, but by the end of his year in Naples, Lewis has formed a completely different view. He has come round to a great admiration for the humanity and culture of the Italians. So much so that if he could be born again, he tells us, and choose the country of his birth, he would choose Italy.

I must declare an interest. My father was in Italy during the second world war, but a little earlier and a little further south.

I discovered this book via the Italian documentary film, assembled from existing film clips and narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch.

Man Overboard by Tim Binding

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Tim Binding’s 2005 novel, Man Overboard, is the story of the World War 2 frogman, Commander Lionel Crabb, who disappeared, presumed drowned, during a mission to spy on a Russian cruiser in Portsmouth harbour in 1956.

The unauthorised dive caused a political furore at the time, as the Russian ship was carrying Kruschev on an official  visit to the UK. There has been much speculation over the years as to what really happened. A headless and handless corpse that washed up some months later in Chichester harbour was identified by the Coroner and buried as Crabb, but his widow insisted that it couldn’t have been him.

It’s been suggested that he was killed by the Russians, or captured and brainwashed by them. This fictionalised account of his life offers an alternative solution to the enduring mystery, which is unlikely to be satisfactorily resolved in our lifetime, as the relevant documents are not due to be made public for many years.

Crabb himself is the narrator of a comparatively short book, written in an intense and poetic prose, with suitably watery imagery. There is an awful lot packed into its 244 pages. Without giving too much away, Crabb looks back in old age from a sanatorium somewhere behind the iron curtain. He did not die beneath the murky, cold waters of Portsmouth harbour.

We get a clear picture of the sort of man Crabb is: Conservative, patriotic, royalist, religious and fatalistic. Yet he is a strange, dual personality, who needs to belong and yet somehow be an outsider at the same time. He is not one of those who believed in a better world to come after the war. It is the revelation of the Katyn forest killings that makes him realise the true nature of Russian communism.

He finds himself out of sympathy with what post-war England has become (“a land of buff-coloured envelopes”), but then he was always something of a square peg in a round hole. Although he didn’t know it, he was a man searching for something. He found his element, in every sense, when he first dived under the water in Gibraltar harbour. On your first dive, you feel as though you “have walked through a magic mirror or travelled in time”, as he puts it.

There is a touch of the visionary about him, but he undercuts his musings with a curt “lot of rot, probably”. His clipped, slightly old-fashioned language with its colourful slang seems completely appropriate for a man of his generation.

In Italy, clearing mines from the canals of Venice, he finds the catholic church and almost marries an Italian girl, but shies away at the last moment. His hesitant relations with women are something of a recurring problem. He is not gay, but oddly reticent about sex, prudish about lower-deck language. He finally seems to have found the right woman, who enjoys the pub and club life of London as much as he does, when circumstances, or rather Crabb’s patriotic devotion to duty, force them apart.

Many historical figures walk through the pages of this novel, such as Kruschev and Yuri Gagarin. Several names are familiar from spy scandals of the period; Anthony Blunt pops up from time to time and towards the end, Greville Wynne, businessman and part-time agent appears. Gordon Lonsdale and Peter Kroger, members of the Portland Spy Ring, are skilfully woven into the story. Sidney Knowles, Crabb’s wartime diving partner appears under his own name. However, Nicholas Elliott, who we now know to have been Crabb’s MI6 handler, is turned into the completely fictional “Smithy”, for reasons that become clear by the end.

There is no author’s note, so it is not clear what sources Tim Binding may have used to create his portrait of Crabb. I found myself wondering if he himself has underwater experience. Crabb does allude to the feature film that was made, The Silent Enemy, and also the biography by Marshall Pugh, both of which appeared after his presumed death.

Crabb’s wartime exploits in Gibraltar, the underwater battle with the Italian frogmen, are generally considered to have been the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s Thunderball, Bond’s underwater mission to plant a limpet mine on the hull of the motor launch in the earlier Live and Let Die also owes something to Crabb. I assume that Fleming, as a senior official in Naval Intelligence during World War 2, knew all about Crabb’s adventures before the general public did.

Recent events mean that the passage where Crabb is told about the Russians’ development of an underwater special forces unit seems strangely contemporary. But then Crabb tells us that “The England you know was made in the fifties and the rest of the world too”.

I enjoyed this book hugely when it came out, and found more in it on a recent re-reading. It is a powerful and haunting novel that deserves to be better known.

The Nightjar by Henry Newbolt

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It’s almost time for the nightjars, those most elusive and mysterious of birds, to be on their way after their fleeting summer visit to these shores.

Here is Henry Newbolt’s poem, The Nightjar, written towards the end of his life, 1936 I think. It’s a bit different to the earlier poems he is most remembered for today, Vitaï Lampada (Play up! play up! and play the game!) and Drake’s Drum.

No opinion or analysis this time, just a poem that I like. Walter de la Mare regarded it highly and wished that Newbolt had written more in the same vein. I found it in an anthology compiled by Kingsley Amis. I believe John Betjeman liked it too. See what you make of it.

The Nightjar

We loved our nightjar, but she would not stay with us.
We had found her lying as dead, but soft and warm,
Under the apple tree beside the old thatched wall.
Two days we kept her in a blanket by the fire,
Fed her, and thought she might well live – till suddenly
In the very moment of most confiding hope
She raised herself all tense, quivered and drooped and died.
Tears sprang into my eyes – why not? The heart of man
Soon sets itself to love a living companion,
The more so if by chance it asks some care of him.
And this one had the kind of loveliness that goes
Far deeper than the optic nerve – full fathom five
To the soul’s ocean cave, where Wonder and Reason
Tell their alternate dreams of how the world was made.
So wonderful she was – her wings the wings of night
But powdered here and there with tiny golden clouds
And wave-line markings like sea-ripples on the sand.
O how I wish I might never forget that bird –
Never!
But even now, like all beauty of earth,
She is fading from me into the dusk of Time.

The Ipcress File by Len Deighton

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The Ipcress File made a big impact when it was published in 1962, partly because it coincided with the release of the film of Dr No. Critics tended to see Deighton’s book as a more realistic take on the world of espionage.

Re-reading it again recently I was struck by just how cryptic and complex it remains. It’s a playful and modernist take on spy fiction. This is reflected in the visual presentation of the book. The black and white photograph on the dust jacket of the first edition, a stark image of a revolver and a coffee cup, was something new in book design. The novel is subtitled “Secret File No. 1” and the prologue starts with what looks like a copy of a memo, summoning the narrator to the Minister’s office to explain the case to him.

The conceit that this is actually a secret document is continued with the use of appendices. Quite important information about major characters, that would be incorporated into the main text in a more conventional novel, is given in this way.

We never find out the narrator’s name. When someone hails him as “Harry” he tells us: “Now my name’s not Harry, but in this business it was hard to remember whether it ever had been.” He has several sets of false identity documents as “a spy’s insurance policy”. Nor do we ever find out the full name of the department he works for, WOOC (P). War Office something something (Provisional) is as near as we get.

There’s a certain irony in the fact that when the novel was filmed in 1965, it was perceived as a more downbeat alternative to Bond, despite being co-produced by Harry Saltzmann, one half of the Bond production team.

The book actually has some things in common with Fleming’s work, most specifically Moonraker. There is the authentic civil service atmosphere at the beginning and also the fact that it is the hero’s female assistant who discovers the crucial clue that cracks the case in both novels.

The film is justly remembered as one of the most gripping and believable of all espionage films, but it is quite different from the book. The book does have quite a lot of description of a changing London, although Deighton was to develop this further in Funeral in Berlin. There’s a sharp contrast between the “official” London of Whitehall and the War Office, and the location of the provisional unit in Charlotte Street, Fitzrovia (“one of those sleazy long streets in the district that would be Soho, if Soho had the strength to cross Oxford Street”).

Whereas the film mostly takes place in London (possibly for budget reasons), in the book our hero travels to Beirut, as well as to a Pacific atoll where a hydrogen bomb test is about to take place.

One of the most interesting changes from book to film is the character of Jay. The book gives a lot of information about his Polish origins and earlier career as a spy and peddler of information. He is rumoured to have been the figure behind the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean. Crucially, he has friends in very high places, as the phone call to the mysterious “Henry” reveals. He ends up working for the British. So that’s why we are told his codename has been changed to “Box Four” in the memo right at the beginning! You really do need to read this more than once, and pay attention while you are doing so.

The title of the novel is an acronym. IPCRESS stands for Induction of Psycho-neuroses by Conditioned Reflex with Stress. The treatment of the brainwashing theme is more realistic in the book than in the film. It is based on recognised techniques, such as disorientation and sleep deprivation. In the film, crucially made a few years further into the 1960s, it has become a psychedelic sound and light show.

What was behind the 1960s obsession with brainwashing? I suppose it was the idea that “altered states” could have a military as well as a hedonistic purpose. There were those crazy American ideas about putting LSD in the Moscow water supply, for example. I believe there was also a fear at the time that television advertising, then relatively new, was manipulating peoples’ minds in ways they were not aware of.

I think the first novel to deal with it was Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate in 1959. A Clockwork Orange, with its suggestion that the minds of criminals could be re-programmed to alter their behaviour, was published the same year as The Ipcress File. Many books and films used the brainwashing idea and the interest was still going strong in 1967, when the first episode of The Prisoner shared a certain feel and a couple of cast members with the film of The Ipcress File.

On a more personal note, it is wonderful what a little internet research can reveal these days. The first TV screening of The Ipcress File was in 1972, 28 May I think. That’s when I saw it for the first time and thought it was the best film I had ever seen. I vividly remember the preview clip, the land rover crashing through the factory door, and thinking this was something I had to see.

Also running on TV around the same time, was a series called Spy Trap. The BBC in their wisdom have wiped the tapes of this one, so it exists in memory only. It was actually very good, with Paul Daneman as the ex-navy officer head of a counter-intelligence department. The funny thing is, it was originally shown in the early evening slot across four days of the week. A spy soap opera! This was the cold war and spies were the thing, not the lives of people in east London. Perhaps these were the formative experiences that pointed me towards a lifelong interest in spy fiction.

 

The Regent’s Canal in fiction

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Just what is it about this North London canal in fiction?

How did the area by the Regent’s canal in Maida Vale come to be known as Little Venice?

A London guidebook I had suggested that the term had first been used by estate agents in the 1950s. I was therefore surprised to find that the name is used in Margery Allingham’s 1934 art-fraud detective story Death of a Ghost.

In the novel, it is not the area but a house that is called “Little Venice”. An artistic clan left over from the Victorian age inhabits the stucco house by the canal basin. So it appears that an estate agent had read Allingham and borrowed the name.

There is a little bit more to it than that, though. This was where Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning lived, sometimes rowing out to the island in the basin.  Allingham mentions “the Crescent”, presumably Warwick Crescent to the south of the canal basin, and Browning’s house was here. Allingham is linking her fictional Victorian painter, John Lafcadio, with Browning, who was rumoured to have commented on the resemblance of this area of London to Venice. There has even been a suggestion that the name was coined by Byron.

Personally, I think it’s all down to Allingham and the rest is an attempt to pull in the tourists. For example, the island is now known as “Browning’s Island”.

I could write a lot more about Allingham and London. I write as one who once spent an afternoon in Bloomsbury, trying to pinpoint the exact location of the square with the little church that features so memorably in The Tiger in the Smoke.

Maida Vale makes its next significant appearance in fiction in Books do Furnish a Room, the tenth volume of Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time sequence, published in 1971, but set in  1946/47, finishing in the freezing winter of that year. This novel introduces a new character, the writer Trapnel, based on Julian Maclaren-Ross. When Pamela Widmerpool embarks on her extra-marital affair with Trapnel, she lives with him in a seedy flat in this area, a bit north of the canal itself.

Jenkins, the narrator, makes an excursion into this netherworld to deliver a book for Trapnel to review. He notes that the area by the canal had not at that time become what he calls a “quartier chic”, as it did later: “The neighbourhood looked anything but flourishing.” There are gaps along the canal where houses have been reduced to rubble by the recent bombing. This now run-down zone is Trapnel’s stamping ground, a suitable locale for a bohemian writer.

The canal proves fatal to Trapnel when Pam throws the manuscript of his novel into it, destroying both the physical pages and Trapnel’s resolve and determination as a writer. It is followed by Trapnel’s death’s head swordstick, which he throws in a despairing gesture. The oily canal, with floating litter of all kinds, might as well be the Styx.

We are in the late 1940s literary scene here, the world of little magazines such as Horizon. Widmermool, MP, businessman and all-round establishment figure, is the proprietor of the magazine Trapnel writes for. There’s a sharp contrast between his West End Parliamentary world and altogether shabbier milieu that Pam has moved into with Trapnel.

Trapnel is supposed to live in a succession of flats in the Paddington area borrowed from acquaintances at his favourite Fitzrovia pub, The Hero of Acre. Powell enthusiasts have identified this as being probably based on The Wheatsheaf. We tend to think of Fitzrovia as a time and place of the1940s, but it appears in the Allingham novel too, which is set in 1930. Campion goes to The Robespierre in Charlotte Street, “that most odd of all London pubs”.

A few years later a location further along the canal appears in John Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The address of the safe house where the mole meets his Russian contact is 5 Lock Gardens, Camden Town, in reality St Mark’s Crescent. It is one of those houses with a walled garden backing on to the canal. Peter Guillam waits on the other side of the canal for the signal that the traitor has arrived. The towpath is closed to the public after dark, leaving it to lovers and down-and-outs, a smell rises from the water and the trains that pass are empty.

John le Carré has always been quite precise about the social status of particular London districts. “The neighbourhood possessed no social identity” is his verdict here. This is a long way from the Pall Mall clubland world of the senior spies. It’s somehow suggested that this is a marginal zone, a very suitable place for undercover activity.

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If Powell, looking back from 1971 was able to suggest that the gentrification of Little Venice had already taken place, no such improvement is evident here. In 1974, Camden market has not yet brought the area back to prominence in the minds of a younger generation.

I’m sure there are many other examples of the strange appeal of the canal being used in fiction. After all, Ruth Rendell was a resident of Little Venice. I believe her last novel was set close to home, but I have not read it. So, I would encourage you to explore this fascinating area of London both in reality and on the page.