“An expert at penetrating the glorious, and inglorious, surfaces of our planet, as a stylist he was a revolutionary, entirely self-taught. In appearance he was someone you could pass in the street without realising anyone had gone by, yet his self-effacing quality, which enabled him to observe unnoticed, concealed extraordinary glamour. For more than 20 years he spied for the British government. He raced Bugattis before the war, lived in Ibiza after it, and was a crack shot, flamboyant host, and businessman with Mafia connexions, leading a life of such self-pleasing hedonism that his existence at times was closer to a rock star’s than anyone else’s.”
The Semi-Invisible Man by Julian Evans
I would wager hardly one in 1,000 well-read people today could identify the writer in question. Taken from Julian Evans’s magisterial and indispensable biography The Semi-Invisible Man (2008), the passage refers to the author of Naples ’44: An Intelligence Officer in the Italian Labyrinth (1978). Presented in the form of a wartime diary, the book describes a city devastated by Allied air raids whose destitute population subsisted on scavenging, the black market, sex work, acting as police informants and crumbs scattered by the Mafia.
The author was Norman Lewis, one of the great semi-forgotten writers of the last century. A sergeant in the Field Security Service of the British Intelligence Corps, Lewis disembarked in Paestum in September 1943. Wandering with American soldiers from the ship past corpses of soldiers laid out neatly in rows, he came on “a scene of unearthly enchantment” – the three perfect temples of Paestum, “pink and glowing” in the last sunlight of the day. In the field between him and the temples lay two spotted cows, their feet in the air. “It came as an illumination,” Lewis writes, “one of the great experiences of life.”
In Naples, Lewis had another seminal experience. Dining with a friend in an unheated restaurant on what turned out to be horse meat, he watched as a group of little girls entered, dressed in black uniforms buttoned up to their chins, their hair cut short, prison-style, clinging to one another for comfort or protection, all of them weeping. Blind, famished orphans, they had been drawn in by the smell of food. Lewis expected his fellow diners to stop and hold out their arms, but everyone carried on as if the children were not there. Until then, he “had clung to the comforting belief that human beings eventually come to terms with pain and sorrow. Now I understood I was wrong, and like Paul suffered a conversion – but to pessimism… I knew that, condemned to everlasting darkness, hunger and loss, they would weep on incessantly. They would never recover from their pain, and I would never recover from the memory of it.”
Lewis’s was a pessimism of strength, not despair or resignation. His delight in the sensation of being alive and the variety of people and places energised him over a long, productive and adventurous life (he died in 2003 at the age of 95). Nor was he always simply an onlooker. In 1968, having heard that the Brazilian authorities – along with ranchers and Christian missionaries – were complicit in the genocide of indigenous communities, he wrote a 12,000-word article for the Sunday Times, inspiring the foundation of Survival International, which campaigns for tribal peoples.
As well as his masterpiece, Naples ’44, he wrote 13 other works of non-fiction, including some volumes of autobiography, and 15 novels. Lewis’s genius as a writer was little understood even when he was most widely read. His deadpan humour went unnoticed, and the infusion of beauty and absurdity in his writings may have been too potent a brew for the taste of his time.
In “A Quiet Evening in Huehuetenango”, the title piece in this engrossing and definitive collection edited by the founder of Eland Books, John Hatt, Lewis has fled from “the bleak depths of an interminable English winter” to the mountainous far north of Guatemala. Dozing off in his hotel room, he is startled by the sound of an explosion, which he surmises might signal the start of a revolution. It comes from fireworks announcing a municipal orchestra, whose ear-splitting performance drives Lewis into a tavern containing a newly installed jukebox. Just as he is about to leave, three bandits arrive, wearing machetes “as big as naval cutlasses” in their belts. One of them politely asks Lewis to operate the machine, then another – baring his teeth in “a thin, bitter smile” – asks him to join them for a drink, “otherwise my friends and I would feel hurt, gentlemen”. After five renditions of a marimba song called “Mortal Sin”, the evening concludes with a small earthquake.
In other pieces we have Lewis being tipped by a Buddhist taxi-driver in Burma, talking with “Fidel’s artist”, who staged executions of Castro’s enemies, and listening to the tales of Cossacks who, having survived starvation and cannibalism in German prisoner-of-war camps, were being repatriated to the Soviet Union where they faced near-certain death. Every one of the 36 selections in the anthology is unforgettable. Rightly, Graham Greene called Lewis “one of the best writers, not of any particular decade, but of our century”. No 20th-century author has blended the comic, the tragic and the lyrical so perfectly in their work. Perhaps only the Polish journalist and (like Lewis) photographer Ryszard Kapuściński resembles him in his intrepid pursuit of insight. As Lewis wrote, “At first I believed in pure travel, and that it was necessary never to have a purpose… Later I found that the discipline of writing compelled me to see more, to understand more deeply, to increase my understanding, and to discard a little of my ignorance.”
A clear view of things is not the default condition of the mind. We must learn to see, and to do that we must expose ourselves to environments beyond those familiar to us in the daily round. Lewis did this throughout his life, but his circumstances were exotic from the beginning.
From Welsh stock, he was born in the London suburb of Enfield – the son of an eccentric pharmacist, who disliked selling proprietary medicines and plied his customers with an all-purpose remedy of his own. Lewis’s parents converted to spiritualism and wanted him to become a medium, which after a fashion he did. He described the messages they received in seances as being “like the random sentences of radio hams, interested only in testing their equipment”. These desultory exchanges may have fortified him in unbelief – as he said more than once, he believed in “nothing, absolutely nothing”. After a rakish few years in his twenties, he became the semi-invisible man who could (as he put it) walk into a crowded room, sum up a situation and leave without anyone noticing. By becoming nobody, he could be a channel to an unseen world.
Eager to escape the cramped London suburbs, he married his first wife, Ernestina, a spirited Swiss-Sicilian whose parents lived in Bloomsbury with an assortment of birds and animals and a shifting company of guests. He came to suspect that his father-in-law, smuggled out of Sicily to America in a coffin to work for an immigrant association, had been a member of the Mafia. The marriage ended amicably when Ernestina moved to Latin America and settled down with a Guatemalan diplomat. His study The Honoured Society: The Sicilian Mafia Observed (1964) and novel The Sicilian Specialist (1985) display a profound knowledge of how the criminal organisation, having been virtually liquidated by Mussolini, came under American patronage after the Second World War to penetrate every section of society.
Lewis went on to establish a business selling cameras. It was in his shop in High Holborn that an unidentified customer recruited him in 1937 to go to southern Arabia and Yemen, at the time closed medieval countries, to collect information for British intelligence. He travelled with a Hungarian journalist-spy, “a fantastic liar”, who later worked for Richard Nixon as an adviser on Vietnam. The Arabic he picked up on the trip led to his enlistment in the Intelligence Corps after war broke out.
No one who has read Lewis could use the term “military precision” without a smile. When he landed on the beach at Paestum, the small British contingent had been given “no orders or briefing of any kind… This was the greatest invasion in the war so far – probably the greatest in history, and the sea was crowded with uncountable ships, but we were as lost and ineffective as babes in the wood. No one knew where the enemy was… All that had landed on the beach were pyramids of office equipment for use in Army Headquarters. We had been issued with a Webley pistol and five rounds of ammunition apiece. Most of us had never fired a gun.”
After the war, a doctor told him he should “make no attempt to come to terms with a regulated and sedentary existence”. He followed the advice, visiting and revisiting South-East Asia, India, Africa, Latin America, Spain, Italy and (in his eighties) the wilds of western Sumatra, East Timor and Irian Jaya in Indonesia.
In 1957, he was commissioned by Ian Fleming, then foreign editor of the Sunday Times but still involved in one or other of the intelligence agencies (he had been assistant to the director of naval intelligence in the war), to go to Cuba to find out whether, as Fleming believed, Castro might succeed in ousting the Batista regime. Travelling through the countryside, Lewis consulted a high priestess of one of the cults introduced by black slaves. She told him the conflict would be over in a year, which – “give a day or two” – it was.
While in Havana he had a meeting with Ernest Hemingway. A bloated figure gulping down tumblers of Dubonnet, the Nobel Prize winner exuded “exhaustion and emptiness”. A man who had “crammed himself with every satisfaction, driven his body to the utmost, loved so many women, dominated so many men, hunted so many splendid animals” had become “a parable on the subject of futility”. According to later reports, Hemingway cultivated Castro’s executioner, sometimes attending on “gala nights”, equipped with a chair and cocktail shaker, to watch the proceedings. Three years after the meeting Hemingway took his own life.
Norman Lewis did not surrender to futility. The self-erasure he practised in his wanderings enabled him to live more intensely. In one of his letters, Keats wrote that a poet is “without identity”. If any prose writer has possessed this negative capability, it is Lewis, who shows us the world as we have never seen it before.
John Gray’s most recent book is “The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism” (Penguin)
A Quiet Evening: The Travels of Norman Lewis
Selected and Introduced by John Hatt
Eland, 504pp, £25
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[See also: The Leopard and the ruins of history]
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This article appears in the 26 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Putin’s Endgame