In one of his later books, Voices of the Old Sea (1984), Norman Lewis writes
about a Catalonian fishing village to which he returned year after year in
the early 1950s: a time of deep poverty and political repression there, but
which also saw the start of the destruction of a closed, largely
pre-Christian way of life by tourism. The village’s first modern
entrepreneur begins by modifying, or just threatening to knock down, any
building he thinks might be off-putting to visitors. The inhabitants are
similarly encouraged either to reconstruct or to get out. Among those
affected, in Lewis’s account, is Carmela, a grave, mysterious woman whose
supposed foster child, Rosa, has cerebral palsy. Rosa is made miserable and
unmanageable by encountering other children; this, at any rate, is the
reason Carmela gives for living at the far end of the shore in a garishly
painted, ramshackle edifice built from a miscellany of wreckage, “braced and
smartened up with partitions and doors filched . . . from the old cork
mansions”. Lewis describes encountering Rosa here, “howling and hooting and
brandishing her arms”, chasing a tethered goat around a dirt yard, a
desperate game which the goat is about to win until Lewis gathers the girl
up to safety.
Carmela cleans and cooks for Lewis in his lodgings but neither his support nor
that of the book’s feudal landlord, Don Alberto, saves her vivid ménage from
the forces of progress. The results of change in her case are ambiguous and
also best left undivulged. In terms of narrative interest and suspense, as
well as in other ways, Voices of the Old Sea works like a novel and, as we
learn from Julian Evans’s Semi-Invisible Man, it was for a novel that
Lewis’s notebooks of these trips were intended to provide material.
Fictionalized or not, though, the episode communicates Lewis’s defining
relish of individuality and hatred of authority and change; these, and
something still more complicatedly to do with himself.
There is a paradox, of course, in the extreme social conservatism of Voices of
the Old Sea. Wasn’t it a kind of anthropological nimbyism on Lewis’s part, a
selfish wish to defend an environment in which he liked to spend time but
which – unlike his friends there – he was free to take or leave? Few people
in 1980s Spain whose parents had been peasants, after all, would have
seriously wanted to return to the condition of their ancestors. Meanwhile,
Lewis’s visits, we learn from the biography, were made in a large Buick, in
the holidaying company of his partner of the the time and their children.
You wouldn’t guess this from Voices of the Old Sea. Lewis was a secretive,
contradictory man who nursed his inconsistencies because they fitted his
understanding of how the world worked.
Such tensions can be seen particularly clearly in Golden Earth: Travels in
Burma (1952). The book’s ostensible aim is that of much of the best travel
writing (and photography and collecting) from the late nineteenth century
on: to help record a culture on the brink of disappearance.
"Far Eastern lands were passing beyond the reach of the literary
sightseer. Korea was scorched off the map, and if we were embroiled with
China, said the observers, the flames of this conflagration might spread to
Burma, where Communist guerrillas were already firmly entrenched. One of two
things would then happen: either the country would pass with China behind
what had been called the Bamboo Curtain, or it would be defended by the
West, as Korea had been defended, and with similar results. In either case
the traditional Burma would have vanished."
And Lewis finds what he says he wants. In the Shan state of eastern Burma, for
example, his ancient motor transport finally collapses and he is transferred
to a bullock cart which will take him to the house of a local headman. The
cart turns off the Burma Road into “the sanctuary of the undisturbed woods”:
"The dazzling white deadness of the grass was broken by sere but
fluorescent bushes and thickets of bamboo, and among these the trees,
pipuls, banyans and flamboyants, massive eruptions of verdure, became
increasingly frequent. Huge rollers flew strongly among their branches,
their wings flashing with Aegean blues."
Lewis’s paradises, though, always contain serpents. He will soon be told about
local insurrections, Chinese attacks, finding out about which at close
quarters is part of what also interests him. Meanwhile, even the colour of
those roller birds must be seen through a different filter. “‘The foolish
bird,’ said Seng, following my gaze of admiration. ‘This is its designation
in the Kachin tongue, because it eats its own faeces.’” In this sense, man
himself is a foolish bird, Lewis often seems to say. The writer besotted
with visual beauty and ancient rituals was instinctively drawn to places of
danger, corruption, disintegration: revolutionary Spain (the locale of most
of his first book, Spanish Adventure, 1935), Batista’s Cuba, Indochina soon
after the Second World War (A Dragon Apparent, 1951), South America before
anyone else began to worry about the rainforests.
An aura grows up, especially among journalists, around writers who manage, as
if by accident, to be in the right place at the right time. Lewis clearly
possessed this knack, if that’s what it was, and among a younger generation
of adventurous writers – James Fenton, Redmond O’Hanlon, Pico Iyer – it made
him a hero, though one of an odd kind. He had met Hemingway in Cuba and they
had interests in common – bullfighting among them – as well as some of their
attitudes to women. No one, though, could have been more different from
Hemingway than Lewis. Dapper in dress, he was nonetheless seedy in
appearance – raffishly so in photographs from his youth, scrawny and
dilapidated in old age. Extremely reserved with strangers, when he spoke it
was in the harsh nasal whine, not so much unreconstructed as ferociously
preserved, of the north London suburb where he had spent much of his
childhood. With the hindsight supplied in 1985 by his autobiography, Jackdaw
Cake, it became possible to interpret much of his strange personality, and
some of his writing, through that background. Lewis’s revelations, for
example, about his parents’ religiosity (they ran the Beacon of Light
Spiritualist Church), and about the bullying at school which led them to
send him away from Enfield to live with his eccentric aunts in South Wales,
offered an all too accessible handle on some of his other writing in the
1980s, particularly about South American Indians and against the
missionaries whom, with a degree of obsession, he increasingly held
responsible for most of the wickedness of empire.
In many ways, this approach to his work holds good, not least in that it
reinforces some important links between him and earlier ethnographic
writers, particularly the Robert Louis Stevenson of In the South Seas and A
Footnote to History. But there are formative experiences other than those of
childhood. None was more important to Lewis’s work – to its subject matter
but also to his ability to carry out his researches in the first place –
than his becoming a spy in 1937, when he was in his late twenties. Before
then, he was conspicuous if anything for a dilettante obliviousness to the
meaning of much of what was going on around him. The responses of the young
man who, along with his wife, found himself in revolutionary Madrid in
October 1934 are so determinedly facetious that much of Spanish Adventure,
for all its descriptive clarity and élan, reads like a non-fiction version
of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. Many books written by outsiders about Spain in the
1930s earnestly over-simplify the political situation; Lewis’s is unique
both in that the country’s politics took him by surprise, and in that
he treated them largely as a joke.
It may have been the mix of apoliticality, linguistic skill and insouciance in
the face of danger on show in Spanish Adventure that alerted the Foreign
Office to Lewis’s potential. He could easily have attracted its attention
earlier, though, through the successful photography business which he ran,
given the international contacts it involved, and its technical
developments: the firm had a corner in underwater cameras. Besides, there
were his unusual Italian connections. In the early 1930s, the young Lewis
married into a fugitive branch of the Sicilian Mafia living improbably in
Bloomsbury. And there was also the fact that, physically, he could easily
pass as Levantine. As a child, indeed, he liked to dress up as T. E.
Lawrence. In any case, early in 1937 Lewis was visited at his shop at 202
High Holborn (the very address could belong to a spy story) by someone who
turned out to have come to recruit him. He soon found himself involved in a
muddled operation in Yemen, the details of which Julian Evans goes a long
way towards disentangling. Then came the Second World War. Lewis served in
Field Security throughout: in North Africa, in Italy and eventually on the
Austrian border, where he interrogated people suspected of being senior
Nazis on the run.
These experiences stimulated the writer roughly in proportion to their
untidiness. The Yemen adventure went immediately into Sand and Sea in
Arabia, published in 1938; his period in southern Italy into the much
longer-gestated Naples ’44 (1978), which is among the war’s literary
masterpieces. In Naples, Lewis found an old civilization pushed back into
savagery: families entirely dependent for their survival on the prostitution
of a daughter, a mother, or both; a man paid to carry letters from relative
to relative through the battle lines, but who simply burned the messages and
kept the cash; industrial-scale looting. In all this, there were two
immediate ironies: that if anyone benefited, it was the Mafia; and that much
of the damage had been caused, and was still being caused, by the armies of
liberation. “Here I saw an ugly sight”, Lewis writes, with the almost
affectless simplicity that characterizes most of the book:
"a British officer interrogating an Italian civilian, and repeatedly
hitting him about the head with a chair; treatment which the Italian, his
face a mask of blood, suffered with stoicism. At the end of the
interrogation, which had not been considered successful, the officer called
in a private of the Hampshires, and asked him in a pleasant, conversational
sort of manner, 'Would you like to take this man away and shoot him?' The
private’s reply was to spit on his hands, and say, 'I don’t mind if I do,
sir.'"
Julian Evans unexpectedly shows that Naples ’44 is among the non-fiction books
to which Lewis added a good deal of imaginative shaping. The narrative’s
diary form helps disguise the freedoms he took with incidents, individuals
and chronology traceable in a more strictly factual journal which he kept at
the time. This revelation and others like it change our view of Lewis's
writing. Among his frustrations was that he never won the reputation he
hoped for as a novelist. The novels – there are fifteen of them: roughly the
same number as his books of other kinds – were not without critical and
commercial success and Evans gives them their due. But there is no getting
around the fact that the ostensibly non-fictional works are Lewis’s most
powerful. It’s not so much that, in them, his imagination was – however
loosely – under the control of fact. His novels are rarely fantastic. The
case is more that, given the freedom of fiction, he didn’t know what to do
with it. The dialogue becomes wooden and over-expository; characters – other
than ones who resemble himself – are left unexplored.
An example is A Small War Made To Order (1966), about the Bay of Pigs
invasion. The book is full of vivid scenes and episodes. It also, like so
much of Lewis’s work, seems to prophesy the disasters of our own time, as
when Peake, a more than averagely capable CIA man, tells his chief, “We seem
to be depending these days for our information entirely on the stuff given
us by the exile groups. Most of it’s years out of date”. Often, though, the
dialogue is made to carry too much information, people’s behaviour is
formulaic, and the plot has been semaphored.
The reluctant British spy, Fane, is very like Lewis, even down to the grammar
school education which enabled him to escape a constricted,
lower-middle-class background. Like Lewis, too, he is terrified of boredom.
The story is based on an actual, ill-conceived errand which Lewis undertook
for the US at the instigation of one of his admirers, Ian Fleming. Here as
elsewhere, Lewis’s intelligence connections were, like Fleming’s own,
inseparable from much of his writing, though the non-fictional results in
Lewis’s case are on the whole much more satisfying than the novels of either
writer.
As far as British intelligence was concerned, the reciprocal advantages of
Lewis’s travels in Central and South America from the late 1950s on are well
documented by Evans. It would be interesting to know how far his trips to
Indochina and the Far East, earlier, also had a double purpose. His Burmese
experiences give a strong impression of having benefited from his
professional contacts and, once again, the material continues to resonate
today. In Rangoon, he passes some spare time on a visit to the jail there,
helpfully arranged for him by the Minister of Information (and future UN
Secretary-General), U Thant. The Director General of Prisons, U Ba Thein,
personally conducts him on a guided tour. The episode is so vivid that the
reader may not pause to ask what purpose Lewis had in his odd choice of
excursion, or why he was given VIP treatment, or who U Ba Thein was. The
Burmese Director General of Prisons had, in fact, been educated in Britain,
worked for British military intelligence during the war, and built up
connections with the CIA which were to prove valuable when he became an
anti-Communist, national-liberationist guerrilla leader in the 1960s. At the
time of Lewis’s visit to the country, the successes of the independence
movement were not as clear-cut as had been hoped by many – among them, its
late leader Aung San, who had been in effect the country’s post-war Prime
Minister. Britain, indeed, may have had a role in the 1947 assassination of
Aung San (whose current democratically elected but house-imprisoned
successor is his daughter).
Wherever Lewis went, the satirist in him part-relished the evils he witnessed.
He was also a romantic who knew how to play the tunes of broken dreams and
decay. Meanwhile, he was too intelligent and too much of a realist not to
know that the victories of strong over weak are hard-wired into nature.
These strands coalesce in his great essay, “Genocide”, the first of several
published by the Sunday Times magazine in the 1970s and early 80s. In it, he
describes the fate of Brazilian Indians at the hands not only of Portuguese
colonists, American missionaries, landowners of every descent and grabbers
in general of gold, diamonds and rubber, but of the government’s Indian
Protection Service itself. “By the descriptions of all who had seen them”,
Lewis wrote, “there were no more inoffensive and charming human beings on
the planet” than the forest Indians. A population of about 4 million (Lewis
excitably multiplied it to 80 million) had been reduced to what was in the
1960s calculated as 100,000 – Munducurus, Cintas Largas, the Bororos among
whom Claude Lévi-Strauss lived in the 1930s – and “the imagination reels at
the thought of what lies in store”. The imagination reels: this is the
keynote. Lewis’s subject – his lifelong theme – is mankind's war
against humanity. As Wallace Stevens had written, “In the presence of the
violent reality of war, consciousness takes the place of imagination”. The
words could have been a manifesto for Lewis’s best work. “Some of the
stories told about the great houses of Brazil of the last century”, he
writes again in “Genocide”, “bring the imagination to a halt” – so, rather
than try to imagine, he simply tells the stories. One of them comes from the
mouth of a contemporary informant, Ataide Pereiro, a mercenary who accepted
that action was needed because, as he put it, “the Indians are sitting on
valuable land and doing nothing with it”, but who drew the line at hanging
an Indian girl upside down with her legs apart and splitting her in two with
a machete. Or perhaps, as Lewis drily surmises, what he drew the line at was
not having been paid his $15.
Lewis’s attacks on dehumanization led him inevitably to deforestation. “Does
any remedy exist for the Indian, who, when the great day comes for the
repossession of his land, finds the forest gone, and in its place a ruined
plain, choked with scrub?” The genocide essay, with all its directness and
moral fervour, was followed by others on similar themes and, as his fame and
influence in this area grew, so did the dangers to him from the kinds of
people he exposed. His career came to a strange climax in these years, when
he was in his seventies. He had the satisfaction of a partial return to his
origins. The Sunday Times wanted pictures, and first among the photographers
who accompanied him was Don McCullin: as intrepid a young north Londoner as
Lewis had once been, and one who became a protégé. But the more Lewis found
out about South America, the worse it seemed. All the more impressive, then,
both that he went on looking, and that in his more reminiscential books of
the same period – Jackdaw Cake among them – there is no loss of humour, and
a positive gain in terms of warmth of tone.
Even if Lewis had not been an author, he would have deserved a biography (and
it might have been less difficult to write). His photographic business would
make one story: this is a writer who built up a highly profitable chain of
camera shops throughout the South of England. And there were other vocations
which Lewis pursued at professional or semi-professional level. He was a
very good diver, and sea-fishing brought him the means to pass more time in
Spain than currency restrictions would otherwise have allowed, while getting
to know the local men who, recognizing his skill, let him work with them. He
also bought and sold fast cars – Bugattis, Porsches, Buicks, Pontiacs. When
he started out, some of these had come on the market because their owners
had been killed in them. Lewis himself risked death – his own and other
people’s – by racing erratically at Brooklands. In Jamaica in the late 1960s
he left a car with its handbrake off on a headland from which it nosedived
harmlesly onto the beach below.
Jobs and hobbies apart (Lewis was also expert on birds and flowers), his by
any standards hectic sex life also keeps his biographer busy. His first
wife, the Sicilian Ernestina Corvaja, was as volatile as Lewis. His
relationship with her was not as durable as the one he developed with her
father, who, true to his code, told his less than welcome son-in-law, “I
will give you my blood”, and meant it. On the outbreak of the Second World
War, Ernestina moved first to Cuba, then Guatemala, but the couple had had a
son in 1936 and remained in contact, albeit of an increasingly rancorous
sort. (One outcome of the relationship – in 1964, a prudent interval after
the father-in-law’s death – was Lewis’s cold-eyed study of the Mafia, The
Honoured Society.) Meanwhile, Lewis had other children: with Hester Reid, a
Scottish nurse whom he met in Italy during the war and with whom, albeit
secretly and at long distance, he kept up a household for twenty years; and
also with Lesley Burley, an air hostess twenty-odd years his junior, with
whom his eventual marriage remained more or less intact until his death,
aged ninety-five, in 2002. These and other relationships overlapped, waned,
rekindled unpredictably. Meanwhile, he drank heavily, was dependent on
Benzedrine, and dashed not only between countries but, within Britain,
between his ménages. His principal bases were at Banchory, near Balmoral,
where Hester lived with her children and where Lewis liked to poach game;
and in London, where for a period in the 1940s he ran three flats
simultaneously: in Knightsbridge; in Farm Street, Mayfair; and on the King’s
Road. Later, he downsized to a place in Orchard Street, which he had
decorated by a theatrical designer. When life there threatened to bore him
he gave parties where the entertainment included indoor rifle-shooting (he
used a silencer) and dancing on the roof edge.
Julian Evans was for a while Lewis’s publisher. Semi-Invisible Man is a good
old-fashioned literary biography in the sense that, among other things, it
attends thoroughly to Lewis’s writing and how it was done. Inevitably, this
creates structural problems: at the simplest level, of chronology. If you
tell the story from cradle to grave, as Evans does, how do you deal with
events that happened at one point but were written up much later? Naples
’44, published in the late 1970s, is an obvious case, but there are several
others, and these 792 pages, for all the fascinating information in them,
aren’t entirely free of repetition. One challenge Evans has had to face is
Lewis’s longevity, and he does this head-on. Semi-Invisible Man is generous,
thoroughly researched, full of valuable insights, and extremely long. Evans
has clearly won the confidence of Lewis’s children and old girlfriends, many
of whom talk here with exceptional vividness as well as apparent
objectivity. He himself has a part in his own story, both as one of Lewis’s
last publishers and as a friend. This contributes a postmodern element to
the book, in which the biographer often ruminates on his task and on his
doubts and hesitations about it. The “semi-invisible” Lewis would not have
approved of this, or of some passages of overwriting, but would probably
have been too polite to say so.
Still, Evans’s insider’s view has plenty to offer. Above all, this often
moving account tells us what Lewis didn’t: not only about the interplay
between fiction and fact in his work, but about his family life, or lives.
The solitary, self-effacing, sometimes melancholy narrator of the books is
revealed as a doting and enjoyable father, if sometimes an alarming one. He
wasn’t exemplary in this role but he was instructive. He told Julian Evans
that he regarded love as a biological addiction, and among the many
contradictory gifts which were indispensable to his writing, not the least –
though the least immediately apparent – was for intimacy.
Julian Evans
SEMI-INVISIBLE MAN
The life of Norman Lewis
792pp. Cape. £25 (US $65).
978 0 224 07275 5
Jeremy Treglown’s most recent biography is of V. S. Pritchett. He is
writing a book about the legacy of the Franco regime in Spanish culture.
