R. V. C. Bodley

Ronald Victor Courtenay Bodley, (3 March 1892 – 26 May 1970) was a British Army officer, author and journalist. Born to English parents in Paris, he lived in France until he was nine, before attending Eton College and then the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. He was commissioned in the King's Royal Rifle Corps and served with them during the First World War. After the war he spent seven years in the Sahara desert, and then travelled through Asia. Bodley wrote several books about his travels. He was considered among the most distinguished British writers on the Sahara, as well as one of the main western sources of information on the South Seas Mandate.

Bodley moved to the United States in 1935, where he worked as a screenwriter. He rejoined the British Army at the outbreak of the Second World War and was sent to Paris to work for the Ministry of Information. He later immigrated to the United States, where he continued to work as a writer and also as an advisor to the United States Office of War Information.

Early life and First World War Bodley was born in Paris on 3 March 1892 to civil servant and writer John Edward Courtenay Bodley and Evelyn Frances Bodley (née Bell). He was the oldest of three children; his brother Josselin and sister Ava were born in 1893 and 1896 respectively. His parents divorced in 1908. Bodley was a descendant of diplomat and scholar Sir Thomas Bodley, founder of the Bodleian Library, and was, through his mother, a cousin of Gertrude Bell, He spent three years serving in a regiment in British India where he began to write and stage plays. His commanding officer once remarked "The plays are amusing. You're a credit to the regiment and all that, but did you join the army to become a soldier or a comedian?" Shortly thereafter the First World War broke out, including by poison gas. The book's success greatly exceeded his expectations, prompting him to continue writing. to adapt the D. L. Murray novel Regency into a feature film. It was the first time Chaplin had hired someone to write a script; he had previously written his own scripts. and completed his work in March, but Chaplin abandoned the script in late May, in favour of another project he was working on. Bodley also worked on the script for the 1938 film A Yank at Oxford. In the United States, Bodley was known to his friends as "Ronnie" and was often referred to in the press as Bodley of Arabia. Bodley frequently gave lectures while travelling the United States, speaking in almost every state and referring to himself as "Colonel" or "Major". By 1944 he had become a US citizen and was an advisor to the Arabic desk of the US Office of War Information. In 1945 he wrote the satirical novel The Gay Deserters, which was inspired by his flight from the German army. It was not well received; Bodley later said that his talents as a writer lay in non-fiction, adding that of "the many novels (...) and several plays [he] had written, four were published and two produced, and all failed to arouse any interest." He wrote an essay entitled I Lived in the Garden of Allah, which was included in Dale Carnegie's 1948 self-help book How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. In 1953 he wrote The Warrior Saint, a biography on Charles de Foucauld. John Cogley from The New York Times said Bodley had "written a clean, poetic and frankly admiring account" of Foucauld's life. In 1955 he wrote the partly-autobiographical His next and final book, The Soundless Sahara, was published in 1968; according to the book's back cover he spent part of his years living in Massachusetts, and the rest in either England or France. He provided information for the book The Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia, by Phillip Knightley and Colin Simpson, which was published by Thomas Nelson in 1969. He died on 26 May 1970 in a nursing home

Personal life Bodley married Ruth Mary Elizabeth Stapleton-Bretherton on 30 April 1917 while on extended leave. He was awarded the Croix de Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur by the President of France in 1919, and appointed Officer of the Ordre de l'Étoile Noire in 1920, Knight Officer of The Order of the Crown by Ferdinand of Romania in 1920, and the Order of Wen-Hu (4th Class) by the Republic of China in 1921.

Publications Bodley published 18 books during his career:

Algeria from Within (1927) Yasmina: A Story of Algeria (1927) Opal Fire (1928) Indiscretions of a Young Man (1931) The Lilac Troll (1932) A Japanese Omelette (1933) Indiscreet travels East (Java, China and Japan) (1934) The Drama of the Pacific (1934) Admiral Togo (1935) Gertrude Bell (1940) with Lorna Hearst Flight into Portugal (1941) Wind in the Sahara (1944) The Gay Deserters (1945) The Messenger (1946) The Quest (1947) The Warrior Saint (1953) In Search of Serenity (1955) The Soundless Sahara (1968)