Wide World
The Earth inhabited by Norman Lewis
Spanish Adventure, Sea and Sand in Arabia, A Dragon Apparent and The Happy Ant-Heap by Norman Lewis
Norman Lewis, one of the great travel writers of the past century, lived an improbably long life and seemed to have been quite simply all over the place. He’s most famous for his writings on southern Italy and the mafia — always an excitable subject for so many — and in one of his final collections, The Happy Ant-Heap, there are a handful of essays on that subject. One on the man who would have brought the mafia to heel, except that they got him first. Another on the Sicilian town of Corleone and its accompanying countryside, where those seeking peace and escape from the regional capital of Palermo might hide. Sicily is the place, Lewis writes, where centuries of invasions were met with centuries of resistance and brigandage, and where only the strongest hand might bring peace.
And earlier in the same collection are two essays on the oddities and strangeness of the landings in southern Italy in the last war, where Lewis was engaged, he says, in the intelligence business. Attached to the American army; trying to make contact with a general who did not for some time wish to leave the battleship on which he had made the Mediterranean crossing; attempting to defend the villa that was to be the general’s headquarters with rifles issued to everyone — cooks, tankers, servants — if the Panzers arrived as expected.
On the beaches, many very young Americans reacted to the overflights of German aircraft by forming circles and praying very loudly.
Lewis had started, before the war, producing quite jaunty travel writing. His 1930s vintage Spanish Adventure, which begins with an attempt to canoe through France to Iberia, was later disavowed by its author. But I must say I enjoyed it. He writes well of train journeys and live chickens in baskets on people’s laps, of seeing the promenades young people made in the evenings because of custom and the demands of old-style courting. I liked his remarks on the good looks or not of the Spanish — their demeanours seemingly independent of how they appear to a curious outsider. How odd it is, Lewis remarks parenthetically, that in England if a girl is particularly beautiful, the local wives will say, completely without foundation, ‘oh, of course the family has some Spanish blood.’ No doubt Lord Byron and his ladies of Cadiz are at least partly to blame.
Sea and Sand in Arabia, meanwhile, is lighter still. Some of the photography in this unwieldy volume — of journey by dhow and other things — is truly excellent. And Lewis’s own words are breezy enough and meet the expected.
Then came the war, and Lewis was in Algeria and Italy and other places, and did all manner of work I have not read about too deeply. And only some time after the war concluded came the first novel, which I have not read, and the first serious travel book, A Dragon Apparent, about what was then still called Indochina.
The younger Lewis wrote more ornately than his latter journalism. His chapters here are almost too long to be read in one sitting. This book took me a while to read. But some of the moments he picks out from the swirling crowd would crown other people’s books. At one time, a cyclist is nearly smashed to pieces by an oncoming lorry but is instead merely knocked off his bike and disappeared under the vehicle’s front bumper. In that part of the world, Lewis says, no one seems to mind events like this, and lorry driver and cyclist both converge — one leaping down from his seat, the other dragging himself upright from the road — and each grasps the other’s hand while both smile and laugh about their good fortune.
Lewis’s collected essays are more of a consistent pleasure. Each piece is nicely self-contained, telling a complete story in a satisfying way. They range around.
One is a possibly fictionalised story of growing up amid English poverty in Enfield, where the squire, a hero of the First World War and perennial, mostly unopposed, candidate for Parliament, insisted in trying to have great feasts and festivals of the old style — Tom Brown-type feasts and festivals where the local children diligently scratched at each other in the traditional bun fight and overturned plates and cups and tables.
An essay about the seeming happiness of the people in communist-run Kerala, and some filled gently with Lewis’s horror of tourism and building development, indicates that Lewis was, for all his productivity into the twenty-first century, a proponent that life was better and truer and more deserving of words and attention before the introduction of the jet aircraft and the travel agents catering to ordinary people.
Another essay is on the part of Papua New Guinea which was, at least in the 1990s, still effectively a stone age society. A place where aircraft deposited eager foreigners to go and marvel at the bodies of venerated ancestors which had been bizarrely preserved by smoking, and women who had suffered the loss of a husband in one of the ceremonial battles fought between tribes were in theory expected to forfeit a finger — to show the depths and sincerity of their mourning.
It’s a wide world that Norman Lewis saw.