‘Nothing he describes is dull’: MICHAEL BARBER on the adventurer and writer Norman Lewis
‘For lust of knowing what should not be known/we take the Golden Road to Samarkand’. Flecker’s lines could serve as an epitaph for Norman Lewis (1908-2003), much of whose life was spent doing just that. ‘I enjoy an adventure,’ he used to say, his ideal destinations being places that were either under the cosh, like Bolivia and Paraguay, corrupt, like liberated Naples, Sicily and Batista’s Cuba, or combustible, like French Indo-china, the demise of which he was one of the first to anticipate. Lewis’s private life was adventurous too. He had six children by three very different partners, the first of whom was the daughter of an exiled Mafioso whose ‘fatalistic irony’ he adopted himself.
Of Welsh descent, but brought up in Essex where his father owned a chemist’s shop, Lewis, whom I interviewed for the BBC in 1975, seemed quite different from those debonair pre-war globetrotters like Peter Fleming and Paddy LeighFermor. With his horn-rimmed spectacles, drill-sergeant’s moustache and rasping London accent he reminded me of the office manager in my first job, a sardonic old sweat whose passion was snooker. Yet like Fleming and Leigh-fermor, Lewis was always determined to live life on his own terms. When war broke out he and his first wife were living in Cuba. She remained there and he returned to Britain, not out of patriotism, but because he thought the war was an experience not to be missed.
Unfit for the sharp end – he was asthmatic – Lewis was enrolled in Field Security, an autonomous Intelligence unit operating in newly liberated territories. Though appalled by much of what he saw, Lewis relished being able to snoop ‘in any place, at any time, and in any dress’, a unique status on active service that he strove to reassert, with some success, on his peacetime assignments.
Like many ex-servicemen Lewis found it hard to settle down after the war, which he described as ‘a shot in the arm’. Financially secure thanks to a second-hand camera business he had started in the Thirties, he persuaded Jonathan Cape, who had published his first novel, to commission a travel book about French Indo-china. The result, A
Dragon Apparent, was a bestseller that introduced readers to an unfamiliar warzone. ‘Nothing he describes is dull,’ said one reviewer, a verdict that was later echoed by Cyril Connolly, who said Lewis ‘could make a lorry interesting’.
Bullied at school for being Welsh, Lewis instinctively empathised with the plight of indigenous peoples like the rain forest Indians of Brazil, whose catastrophic decline he investigated for the Sunday Times in 1973. The result was a long indictment called Genocide which confirmed the existence of a ‘final solution’ to the Indian problem, instigated by government agents in the pay of loggers and mineral prospectors who coveted the tribal lands. Even worse was the connivance of American Protestant missionaries in the massacres, a classic example, Lewis thought, of the way in which the interests of fundamentalist religion and aggressive capitalism coincided.
Genocide inspired the foundation of Survival International, a body dedicated to the support and protection of all tribal peoples. But Lewis admitted to me that, at bottom, it was curiosity and restlessness that drove him rather than humanitarian zeal. ‘What happens is that I get a sudden urge to go somewhere remote, like the Brazilian jungle, which involves a good deal of discomfort and even danger, and where I ask myself what on earth I think I’m playing at. But then I stumble across something that concerns me, like the plight of the Indians, and I begin writing and campaigning on their behalf.’ Lewis also sounded an early warning about the damage done to the environment by cutting down the rain forest. It would, he told a friend in 1978, ‘be like the world losing a lung’. As well as travel books Lewis wrote The Honoured Society, a scholarly history of the Mafia, and Naples N l ’44, a war memoir now regarded as his masterpiece. He also wrote 15 novels, one of which, The Sicilian Specialist, both the CIA and the Mob did their best to suppress. What gave offence was the plausible theory Lewis advanced about their culpability in President Kennedy’s assassination. Noting how during the war the CIA’S predecessor, the OSS, had forged lasting links with mobsters like Vito Genovese and Lucky Luciano, Lewis argued that both organisations had good reason to hate Kennedy following the Bay of Pigs disaster, for which they held the President to blame. Lewis even proposed a real-life alternative killer to Oswald: a crack-shot Cuban called Bonachea Leon who was let out of prison to bump off high profile targets. Mysteriously, Lewis won no prizes and received no accolades, an egregious oversight that must have tested his capacity for ‘fatalistic irony’. So to end on a positive note, here are two of his typically quirky anecdotes. In Algeria, he was told of a French professor studying consciousness who would station himself beside the basket of the guillotine, ready to grab the severed head and shout a question in its ear. And in Naples, he met a gynaecologist who specialised in restoring lost virginities. Many of Norman Lewis’s books are published by Eland Books