A Quiet Evening by Norman Lewis review – they don’t make travel writers like this any more
From run-ins with Hemingway in Havana to gunmen in Guatemala, this colourful collection of the late writer’s long-form journalism shows why Graham Greene was an admirer
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. Rangy and moustachioed, 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 ardours 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 multiple sclerosis 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 coloured 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.
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