Norman Lewis
By Adrian Cole
Adrian.cole@verizon.net
Discussed in this essay:
In Sicily, Jonathon Cape, London, 2000
Naples ’44, Eland, London, 1983
The Honoured Society, Eland, London, 1984
Voices From The Old Sea, Viking, London, 1990
Norman Lewis, who died earlier this year, was once considered one of Britain’s greatest living writers. His groundbreaking work, Naples 44, was considered by the literary critics of the time one of the top five books about World War Two, jostling for position with the likes of Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. His later book, The Honoured Society, which was one of the first comprehensive examinations of the Mafia in Sicily and the American role in re-establishing their power post World-War II, boasted the rare achievement of serialization in The New Yorker. A third book, this time a novel about Sicily, sold over 400,000 copies in Russia. It is strange, and not a little sad, however, that today appreciation of his work remains a minority phenomenon. This is all the sadder because the drive of most of his work is extremely contemporary and still relevant to us in that he spoke from a critical period of irreversible change in Europe and the further flung parts of the globe. And as a craftsman he is among the finest in his subtle evocation of a sense of place, his genius for characterization, and his rhetorical economy.
Much of our understanding of the past these days comes from two hegemonic, uncompromising sources: movies and academic histories. Both of these fail to get at the truth in their own distinct ways, and we only realize it once in a blue moon, when we come across something--a document, an individual--which casts events in a starkly different light. Norman Lewis is such a source, and his writings covering the second half of the twentieth century have the unerring habit of showing us a historical reality we have rarely seen.
Take the allied invasion of Italy, for example: serving as an intelligence officer in the British Army in 1944, Lewis kept a journal of his experiences, which appeared in print in 1978 under the title Naples ’44. As part of a small British unit attached to the headquarters of the American Fifth Army, Lewis accompanied the troops ashore to the “Red Beach” at Paestrum near Salerno:
“In place of the guns, tanks, armoured cars, barbed wire, we had expected to see, all that had been landed in this sector of the beach were pyramids of office equipment for use by Army Headquarters. We had been issued with a Webley pistol and five rounds of ammunition. Most of us had never fired a gun.”
With his knack for describing the absurdity within the bizarre, and refreshingly devoid of self-glorification or simplistic patriotism, Lewis continues to paint a picture of wartime Naples: the starving yet resourceful Neapolitans, the panic-stricken and bewildered Allies, and the occasional rotting German corpse buried in the back yard. In an era in which it is difficult to see beyond representations of the Allies as heroic and humane—the gum-chewing farm-boy infantry-man in movies like Saving Private Ryan, or the happy-go-lucky English “Sarge” of stock character—it is invigorating to discover some dimension to war-time characters: Lewis reports seeing an English intelligence officer beating an Italian civilian about the head with a chair until his face is a bloodied pulp. Then he asks his subordinate, in a “pleasant, conversational sort of manner,” whether he would like to shoot the man. ‘Don’t mind if I do, Sir,” the sarge replies jauntily. The ugly truth: war is brutal, and everybody touched by it is part brute, regardless of nationality. The reason why this is refreshing, while simultaneously revolting, is that we are suffocated by accounts which avoid just this kind of complexity, and it is complexity which forms the building blocks of truth.
Then there is the time when Lewis and his colleagues, lounging outside their borrowed, looted farmhouse, see American tanks racing towards the front, only to return soon afterwards, several of their number missing. One of them stops nearby, and its crew tumbles out, “weeping” and embracing each other. Soon after, an American officer pulls up in a Jeep, gives them all carbines with stern orders to return them “afterwards,” then leaves them to face the oncoming Tiger tanks. Later they are told that the officers are planning to abandon their men and retreat. The Americans are under orders to beat any surrendering Germans to death with their rifle butts. In the bay, “distraught” American gunners shoot down three spitfires, mistaking them for German aircraft; Allied albatrosses.
“Official history,” Lewis writes prophetically, “will in due time set to work to dress up this part of the action at Salerno with what dignity it can. What I saw was ineptitude and cowardice spreading down the command, and this resulted in chaos. What I shall never understand is what stopped the Germans from finishing us off.”
Lewis does not intend to cast aspersions on allied integrity; he was simply a first-hand witness to the terror, the suffering and the ultimate disorder that marked the latter stages of the war, when the allies were beginning to explore an occupied Europe they had been largely excluded from for several years. What surprise, then, that the Americans, English and the rest of the Allies should be terrified, paranoid, cowardly, and excessively brutal while going into the labyrinth? In Naples they found a civilization in ruins, its people traumatized, starving, unreliable, its buildings booby-trapped. It is simply realistic to expect the Allies to be skittish, anticipating a German counter-offensive at any moment. There is even one time, Lewis reports, when the Americans were sure that Germans had infiltrated their own ranks and so they started shooting one another.
The immediate value apparent in Lewis work is his role as witness, and as an intelligent observer with an inclination towards recording. As someone who lived through an extra-ordinary experience, we want him level-headed in his commentary, able to give us the wide view of things, but we also want a sense of what it must have been like on a personal level, and Lewis supplies us with this balance with great effectiveness. As a participant in the war he occasionally expresses fatigue, disgust, dismay, but he always remains an effective chronicler of the events around him, producing spare and economical prose with occasional streaks of purple, subtle flashes of the ornate, which hint at the real intensity of the experience without laboring it.
When he is abruptly posted away from Italy, he realizes that there will be no time for goodbyes to the people he has come to know so intimately in their pain. Packing before he leaves Naples:
“A movement at a window
across the road distracts me and I look up to see a woman called Giulietta
appear momentarily between the shutters naked from the waist up on the pretence
of washing herself – a familiar sight which we have come to accept as no more
than a tiny offering to the god of fertility…For the last time I look into the
eyes of the enormous and enigmatic female statues flanking the entrance to the
Calabrito Palace, and then into the courtyard itself, where a small child is
pissing into the mouth of a stone lion.”
A trademark of Lewis’s writing, however, is his ability to avoid being sucked into the moment to the exclusion of all else. He makes us aware, for instance, of the long historical durée, when, in one of many moment of idleness, (which seem to characterise war as much as furious activity does), he and some of his unit go sight seeing, and come across the three temples of Paestrum lined up in a row “pink and glowing and glorious in the sun’s last rays,” after which they go to sleep in the undergrowth to be woken later by the proximate voices of German soldiers. Even under the broiling, all-encompassing pressure of war, Lewis can see Naples as a site of deep historical texture, a place with a life, and therefore the war becomes merely a period that will pass and take up its place in the record.
This quality of his writing enables him to act as a travel writer, keenly observing people and places without exclusive and constant reference to the extraordinary conditions prevailing around him. He was as interested, for instance, in such timeless concerns as the sexual mores of the southern Italians, or their culinary passion, as he was in the extremity of their actions in their desperate current conditions. He weaves the social observation into the description of contemporary events seamlessly to make Naples a place greater than its present miserable predicament: “Food, for Neapolitans, comes even before love, and its pursuit is equally insatiable and ingenious.” At the official banquet to welcome the conquering General Mark Clark, who was rumored to love sea food, the principal course was the city aquarium’s prized baby manatee: “No other fish had been spared, however strange and specialized its appearance and habits.”
In scenes which are becoming familiar again to today’s generation, and which give Lewis’ writing a surprising relevance, he describes the inability of the recently liberated Italians to perceive their self-interest and cooperate with the allied administration. Italy’s destruction at the hands of the Fascist government, however, does not leave it always and everywhere open to the allied medicine. Naples lies in the Zona di Camorra, after all--a criminal grouping second only to Sicily’s Mafia--and the Allied Military Government finds it hard to distinguish between friend and foe in an environment in which the ancient rules of patronage still apply. Allied materials disappear from circulation as soon as they are landed; the entire Neapolitan population is dressed in army blankets, redesigned as great coats; militia leaders praised and rewarded by allied generals steal whole train loads of heavy munitions with which to fight their internecine feuds; Allied penicillin is in short supply because it has been monopolized by an Italian gangster with ties to the American chiefs.
These wartime experiences begin a long relationship with southern Italy for Lewis, and Sicily in particular, which he explores in several works of fiction and non-fiction. There are meetings with secessionists in Naples, which are echoed when he travels to Sicily to research a book on the Mafia, culminating in his landmark work The Honoured Society (1962). Characteristically, in this volume he does not shy away from the hard questions posed by, for instance, American involvement with Mafia powers during the war, and he tells the story of the rapid re-establishment of the Mafia under the guiding hand of the Americans. Here he is recording an age-old military phenomenon, and one familiar to American foreign policy today: the necessity of allying oneself with thugs. While the Anglo-Canadian troops spent five weeks and endured thousands of casualties to reach Messina on Sicily’s east coast, the American Seventh Army in the west advanced northwards towards Palermo with incredible speed and barely a shot being fired, in what General Patten called “the fastest blitzkrieg in history.” Largely responsible for this was Don Calogero Vizzini, the notorious head of the Sicilian Mafia at the time, and mayor of the mountain town of Villalba, who was contacted by American soldiers speaking in the local Sicilian dialect, and charged with turning Sicily over to the allies.
The allied relationship with Mafia powers reestablished the mafia after it had been partially crippled by Mussolini, and its grip on Sicilian economy and society increased rapidly in the post war years until the organization had become a world-wide criminal underground responsible for a large part of global heroin traffic. Taking the opportunity offered by the allies, Vizzini and his followers were able to exercise their attitude to the central Italian government which had about as much meaning for them as did the government of ancient Rome: “Let the Romans keep their laws,” Lewis quotes him as saying in 1945, defending his extortion of olive oil, the Sicilian dietary mainstay. “In this part of the world we have our own way of doing things.” His words resonate today, in the halls of the Pentagon, the canyons of Afghanistan and the deserts of Iraq.
If, as a participant in the war, Lewis was well-placed to be a witness to historical events, his testimony did not cease after 1945. On returning to England, he settled down to write fiction and non-fiction. His work included successful novels such as The Volcanoes Above Us and the Sicilian Specialist, which was a best seller, and both of which dealt with wartime experiences and his time in southern Italy. He also produced several noteworthy travel books, including the enormously popular classic, Voices of the Old Sea, an account of several seasons spent in the Spanish fishing village of Farol in the late 1940’s.
This story provides us with an account of the passing of a traditional way of life, and Lewis is alive to the fact that Farol’s existence, largely unchanged for centuries, will come to an end in post-war Europe, with greater European integration. He chose Farol partly for its isolation, and he was advised by the visiting police prefect to leave the town, as its inhabitants were barely Spanish, in fact they were barely even Christian. Mired in poverty and isolation, the village ekes out its existence with inadequate boats and equipment, in an “old sea” with dwindling supplies of fish. The villagers adhere to customs so ancient no one can even explain what they mean. Perhaps the most startling of these is the annual festival, the centerpiece of which is what they call the “pilgrimage.” For this, a pre-pubescent girl is chosen, and the women travel in a procession of fishing boats to a cave along the rocky coast. Inside the cave the girl is gently smacked on the backside several times, candles are burnt and then the women travel back to the town. No man has ever seen the ceremony. Searching for an explanation to the meaning of this ritual Lewis encounters shrugs and a generalized scratching of the head from the village’s population.
Lewis’ ability to blend with foreign environments, which was a requirement for wartime intelligence workers, is equally useful to him as a writer. He gained access to the inner circle of fishermen in Farol, and listened to their conversation, conducted in rhyming couplets set to song, and even featured in several of these renditions as spear-fishing character. He also won over the “Grandmother” who was the ultimate arbiter of everything in the village.
His most recent book, In Sicily, is further evidence of how his ability to adopt other cultures and make lasting relationships within them formed a basis for his writing career. It is a moving and retrospective work, in part a homage to his Sicilian friends and his long relationship with them. These include the ascetic anti-Mafia activist Danilo Dolci who crusaded against corruption and the crushing poverty of the Sicilians; Marcello Cimino, who lead the drive by Sicilian journalists against the power of the Mafia, and his wife Giuliana Saladino, author of Terrra Sangrienta, in Lewis’ words, “possibly the most important study of the Mafia, and its most moving account of its victims to date.”
His introduction to Sicily, however, came through his first wife, Ernestina, or more importantly, in the end, her father, Ernesto Corvaja, who had come to live in London via the United States. Ernesto dressed everyday in a pin stripe suit, having asked his tailor how to look like an English gentleman. He spent his days gambling professionally in Ostend where he was known as “Le Monsieur Anglais,” but in reality he despised the shallowness of his “work.” He had harbored boyhood dreams of being a museum curator after an uncle had taken him on a dig in Sicily in which they had unearthed a bejeweled bull of Mesopotamian origins, and a necklace that had once adorned the throat of a princess from the court of Philip of Macedonia, Alexander’s father. Ernesto, and his memories of aristocrats in the Parco Favorita killing cats with steel-tipped whips, and the duels fought there over honor, opened Lewis to a life-long attachment to the island, its people and its problems, and in the tradition of the greatest of writers, what is left after the descriptions and the anecdotes and the details is a sense not just of place, but more importantly of the human relationships which underwrite the whole endeavor of being a traveler, and dependent on the generosity of strangers.
A tour through several of Lewis’ books leaves one with the feeling that good writing is only partly about being a good writer, but also largely about being a good liver. In Lewis’ case, his prose is smooth and simple, laced with a gentle irony and understated humor. His characters are multi-dimensional and invested with life in the way that can only be achieved through substantial emotional knowledge of them. He has waded into life up to the neck, life as an “old sea,” and it is this molecular engagement with it that he conveys so intensely on the page. His historical position certainly gave him subject matter with which to work, but more importantly, he possessed enough openness to other people and compassionate interest in their plight to produce stories of enduring interest and importance from hundreds of individual experiences. But as with the mystic journey, the travel writer is in a sense always chasing the rainbow. In a conversation at the end of his autobiographical volume, The World, The World, Lewis tells his Brahmin companion why he travels: “It’s a compulsion I’ve always felt. It’s the pull of the world.” His companion asks him if this is freedom, and he admits, “No, not quite, its never quite that.” Then the Brahmin asks him whether he is not looking for people in his own mountains.
“Nowadays, yes. I’m looking for the people who have always been there, and belong to the places where they live. The others I do not wish to see.” This admission comes almost as a relief, as it speaks to a very human need, that of belonging, and there is a certain longing in his final words, a longing for place and an attachment to it.
“The man who finds his homeland sweet,” wrote Victor Hugo, “is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land.” The world, however, is a very large place to be attached to, and one almost hopes that after a life of such peregrinations, Lewis became again a tender beginner. If he started looking for people in his own mountains, then perhaps this was so.