The travelogues of Norman Lewis, which are much admired for the extraordinary burnish they attain, were written by him in a spidery longhand. The author of acclaimed accounts of the Sicilian mafia and the exploitation of Indigenous tribes in South America, he scribbled his rewrites on fresh scraps of paper and, with the help of his wife Lesley, pasted them over earlier drafts until his manuscript crackled like parchment.
I observed this process for myself when I interviewed the writer, by then in his 90s. We were at his home, an old rectory in deepest Essex enclosed by a wild garden which grew as high as an elephant’s eye. Here he recuperated between adventures in an “introspective, almost monastic calm,” or so the blurb on his book jackets improbably claimed.
ZOOT SUITS AND BUGATTIS
Rangy and mustachioed, he had been an early adopter of zoot suits, a crack shot and a zealous if foolhardy racer of Bugattis. His life had included strenuous ardors and undercover work in Cuba for MI6 and the CIA. Lewis died in 2003. Now many of his best articles are being published between hard covers for the first time in this collection, its title as uncharacteristic of its author as his claims of monk-like meditation.
By the time I met Lewis, he was enjoying a deserved Indian summer. His backlist had been rediscovered thanks to his indefatigable publisher, Eland, whose red-and-cream livery has become an earnest of good writing. At this stage of his career, it wasn’t only Lewis’s glue-stiffened manuscript that took the form of a palimpsest. He was revisiting his experiences from long ago, overlaying them with the gloss of hindsight.
“He started to take the past as his literary object,” according to the writer Julian Evans, who published a biography of Lewis five years after his death.
One of his greatest books, Naples ’44, about his service as an allied intelligence officer among the embattled Neapolitans, took the form of a diary, but Evans found that Lewis kept no journal at the time and made only a handful of notes. The finished text, said Evans, was an “invented diary… scored and colored by its detached and sensitive remaking”.
These revelations threatened to damage Lewis’s reputation. My view, for what it’s worth, is that his later books are like a great artist’s prints, deftly elaborated works run off from plates etched many years earlier.
John Hatt, the founder of Eland, had the great idea of putting together this miscellany of Lewis’s brightly enameled reportage. In truth, the quiet evening of the title was anything but. Lewis was in a bar in Guatemala when three men with machetes (“as big as naval cutlasses”) swept in: “smugglers and gunmen, if pushed to it, ready to hack each other — or the lonely traveler — to pieces for a few dollars, and yet with a tremendous, almost deadly punctiliousness in matters of social intercourse.”
The desperadoes were distracted by the novelty of a jukebox in the cantina and the ringleader, offering Lewis a courtly bow, requested: “If you could induce the machine to play Mortal Sin for us, we should be much indebted.”
It’s a little early in the year to be handing out cups but I doubt that there will be a finer book of nonfiction than this. It includes an encounter in Havana with Ernest Hemingway, at the time the most celebrated author in the world. Lewis was astonished to see “exhaustion and emptiness” on that much reproduced face.
Graham Greene, no mean travel writer himself and a great admirer of Lewis, liked to quote the poet Robert Browning: “Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer…”
PARADOXICAL CHARACTERS
Lewis likewise peopled his landscapes with engrossingly paradoxical figures: the potless aristocrat, the fastidious mafioso, the IT professional with an interest in snake charming. He brought back reports of European territories that appear in no gazetteer. In Lewis’s telling, these “straw-colored” and lonely hinterlands, frequented only by shepherds and assassins, were Brigadoons of iron-clad custom and melancholy chivalry.
If he harked back to years gone by, so, too, does this collection: to the day before yesterday, a time now entirely unrecoverable, when editors of newspapers and magazines commissioned writers such as Lewis to produce long-form journalism. Although no one called it that at the time, because it didn’t occur to anyone to find its length remarkable. No successor to Lewis could subsist on journalistic commissions today. With a handful of notable exceptions, the footsore scribbler has gone the way of the milkman and the bus conductor, disappeared into a terra incognita, the undiscovered country from which no travel writer returns.
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