Book description
Norman Lewis arrived in war-torn Naples as an intelligence officer
in 1944. The starving population has devoured all the tropical fish in
the aquarium, respectable women had been driven to prostitution and
the black market was king.
Lewis found little to admire in his fellow soldiers, but gained
sustenance from the extraordinary vivacity of the Italians around him
- the lawyer who earned his living by bringing a touch of Roman class
to funerals, the gynaecologist who specialised in the restoration of
lost virginity and the widowed housewife who timed her British lover
against the clock. "Were I given the chance to be born
again," writes Lewis, "Italy would be the country of my choice."
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,
was published.
Lewis travelled to offbeat parts of the world well into his 90s,
returning to the calm of rural Essex where he lived with his third
wife. He died in July 2003 at the age of 95.
