War time Naples, genocide in Brazil and spying in the Balkans, stories from the pen of Norman Lewis

Sometimes without very little effort you get drawn into someone’s life which in the case of Normal Lewis was both a surprise and a pleasure.

In my case it came about in Waterstones which like a lot of people is part of what you do on a Saturday afternoon in between browsing the shops, having a meal and catching a film.

There in the travel section was his book Naples ’44 which describes his year in the city with the allied armies during the Italian Campaign. He was an intelligence officer seconded to the American 5th Army.  During the course of the year he kept a diary which became the book.

It is a closely observed description of life after the war has moved on leaving an aftermath of broken buildings, a desperate lack of food and a breakdown of the usual conventions of morality.

Not that the violence is quite over.  The Germans continue to bomb the city; there are delayed action mines which have been buried in the cellars of buildings as well as bandits, vendetta’s and the casual acts of barbarity inflicted on the civilian population.

Amongst all this there are vivid accounts of life lived out on the streets, the power of superstition and bravery and generosity of the Neapolitans.

All of which I want to return to but right now it is Mr Lewis who fascinates me, more so because his writing career stretched on in to  his 90s, which gives me hope.

So with due deference to his publishers whose account of his life I have lifted directly here is something of the story of this remarkable man.

“Norman Lewis's early childhood, as recalled in Jackdaw Cake (1985), was spent partly with his Welsh spiritualist parents in Enfield, North London, and partly with his eccentric aunts in Wales.

Forgoing a place at university for lack of funds, he used the income from wedding photography and various petty trading to finance travels to Spain, Italy and the Balkans, before being approached by the Colonial Office to spy for them with his camera in Yemen.

He moved to Cuba in 1939, but was recalled for duty in the Intelligence Corps during the Second World War. It was from this that Norman Lewis's masterpiece, Naples '44, emerged, a resurrection of his wartime diary only finally published in 1978.

Before that came a number of novels and travel books, notably A Dragon Apparent (1951) and Golden Earth (1952), both of which were best sellers in their day. His novel The Volcanoes Above Us, based on personal experiences in Central America, sold six million copies in paperback in Russia and The Honoured Society (1964), a non-fiction study of the Sicilian Mafia, was serialised in six instalments by the New Yorker.

Norman Lewis wrote thirteen novels and thirteen works of non-fiction, mostly travel books, but he regarded his life's major achievement to be the reaction to an article written by him entitled Genocide in Brazil, published in the Sunday Times in 1968. 

This led to a change in the Brazilian law relating to the treatment of Indians, and to the formation of Survival International, the influential international organisation which campaigns for the rights of tribal peoples.

He later published a very successful book called The Missionaries (1988) which is set amongst the Indians of Central and Latin America.


More recent books included Voices of the Old Sea (1984), Goddess in the Stones: Travels in India (1991), An Empire of the East: Travels in Indonesia (1993), The World the World (1996), which concluded his autobiography, as well as collections of pieces in The Happy Ant Heap (1998) and Voyage by Dhow (2001). With In Sicily (2002) he returned to his much-loved Italy, and in 2003 his last book, A Tomb in Seville, will be published."

Picture; from the covers of Naples ’44, Jackdaw Cake and Voices of the Old Sea, courtesy of Eland Publishing Ltd, http://www.travelbooks.co.uk/