March Meeting: by Bill Doherty

Novel and Screenwriting – John Howlett

On 16 March the intrepid membership of the Lit. Soc. defied the rigours of ‘the mini-beast from the east’ to hear novelist, screenwriter and playwright John Howlett discuss his work. He started with the ‘twilight zone’ – a space shared by early memories and family histories; a legacy which extended to a familiarity with and understanding of events which in some instances had even preceded his birth. This well of knowledge was deepened in later life by personal encounters -  with a taciturn head gardener in one of his first jobs in whom he succeeded in busting some dam in the psyche to release a flood of Great War reminiscence. The speaker’s own earliest memory is being carried from his attic bedroom in wartime Croydon to play with his ‘Dinky’ toys under the family’s Morrison table on the ground floor – a fortunate maternal premonition as his bedroom was damaged by a bomb. A trip to Rome in his youth was to provide a Damascene conversion to writing as his creative outlet. The ‘twilight zone’ was to be the kernel of creativity for his roman-fleuve, the six book Harry Cardwell series which opens, like Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms in a military hospital in Italy near the end of the First World War.

One of his earliest and best-known screenplays was for the 1968 film If…,  directed by Lindsay Anderson and starring Malcolm McDowell, which successfully rode the Sixties’ Zeitgeist with its portrayal of schoolboy revolt and full-scale war against the school authorities. The grit for this pearl came courtesy of his days at Tonbridge School where they prophetically branded him ‘subversive’. Howlett made an interesting observation of attitudes to different categories of creative writing in telling how Anderson felt free to unilaterally cut, splice, bend and reshape a screenplay while revering every punctuation mark in the script of a play. John continued to carry a torch for subversion with a piece on the ‘rebel without a cause’, James Dean.

Given his cosmopolitan family background, it was not surprising to hear that our speaker became a self-confessed ‘wandering minstrel’ screenwriting thoughtful, ambiguous and critically well-received TV thrillers in England, Germany and Italy. Happily ensconced in the last of these, he found his professional life disrupted by the political advent of Silvio Berlusconi who   realigned the cultural axis of Italian TV towards Football Italia  and bunga-bunga parties. In a reflective coda, our guest spoke of his personal pantheon of masters of the written word: Lorca, Pablo Neruda and T.S. Eliot. 

This absorbing account of a varied, productive and principled professional career was enthusiastically appreciated by the assembled Lit. Soc. Members.