Hotsdoogs

Norman Lewis​ wrote about himself that ‘travel came before writing. There was a time when I felt that all I wanted from life was to be allowed to remain a perpetual spectator of changing scenes.’ Luckily for us, his broadening skill as a writer caught up with his lust for those ‘changing scenes’. He became a novelist, a great reporter – one of the most effective investigative journalists of his day – and an author of what is inadequately described as ‘travel writing’. This book is an anthology mostly of the last category. Here is Lewis reporting on what he encountered in Latin America, Africa, South-East Asia and, above all, southern Europe: Spain, Ibiza, Sicily, Sardinia and his beloved Naples. Most of these pieces appeared in British or American magazines or newspapers, especially the Sunday Times. But it’s significant that so many of them are ‘reconstructive’, written up from notebooks or journals scribbled at scenes experienced decades earlier. If anything, the time lags enrich his reflections rather than fade them. This is because Lewis lets the delay ferment memory and old jottings with an element of invention – or at least imagination. As Andrew O’Hagan wrote (in the LRB of 25 September 2008), ‘his fictional powers only reached full flourish when he wasn’t writing novels.’ Take Naples ’44, which many readers (including me) think was his masterpiece. An account of his service as an intelligence officer in that starving, chaotic city as it was ‘liberated’, it was written and published more than thirty years later in the form of a day-by-day diary. In reality, Lewis used all sorts of notes, diary fragments and slices of sheer fiction for a ‘creative reconstruction’. The result is a book whose compassion, horror, outrageous comedy and descriptive genius make it one of the most telling narratives of the war in any language.

The most sustained of Lewis’s inventions was himself. Starting from an inconspicuous family in the London suburb of Enfield, he was bullied at school, acquired a beard and surprising clothes and became ‘different’, a rebel. When his girlfriend married someone else and the vicar got to ‘Should anyone present … ?’ Norman started a shouting commotion from the back of the church. He became something of a bright young thing in 1920s Bloomsbury, opening a chain of camera shops and marrying a rich girl from a Sicilian family (refugees from Mussolini’s Italy). Now began his lifelong compulsion to travel. There were people he didn’t want to be and places where he didn’t want to be: Enfield, but perhaps England too – or just being English. The indispensable guide to Lewis is Julian Evans’s affectionate encyclopedia of a biography, Semi-Invisible Man (2008), and Evans at one point suggests that Lewis was not English anyway. His father was a Welsh speaker who was never entirely at ease with the English language, and at the age of eleven, Norman was sent away for a year to live with his grandfather and three maiden aunts in Carmarthen, a joyless and slightly mad household. He never felt at home there, or learned more than a few words of Welsh. But he seized on ‘being Welsh’ as a self-masking identity, intended to make him different, even mysterious, to his contemporaries. This strategy didn’t always convince. He certainly seemed English enough to his friends as he grew up and calmed down, emerging as a self-effacing, rather taciturn and evasive man who concealed a strong will and used it to make unexpected choices. And at the outset of his writing career there was a marked Englishness in the way he presented ‘exotic’ lands and their inhabitants. In later life, between voyages, it was in England’s rural Essex that he chose finally to settle.

Travel writing is a trade older than Herodotus. It’s about ‘men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders’. It’s designed to amaze, to bring back accounts of strangeness, especially human strangeness, from far places. Sometimes it feeds escape fantasies about happier, freer lands on the other side of the moon: this is why Poles and Czechs, for example, nationalities long trapped under the enormous bums of Russian or Germanic empires, used to consume so much gaudy pulp literature about other continents. Ryszard Kapuściński, writing often fiction-spiced African reportage for Polish readers under communism, was a good example.

But ‘otherness’ has been marketed in very different voices. One is Herodotean. His journeys taught him an Olympian relativism: all peoples have their own way of doing things, and ‘each group’ regards its own customs ‘as being far the best’. But that non-judgmental voice was soon drowned, in the time of the Persian Wars, by the shouts of an Athenian nationalism that injected moral value into cultural difference. If you wore ‘oriental’ clothes or spoke a non-Greek language, you were not only strange but inferior, degenerate, untrustworthy, ‘barbarian’. Two millennia later, as Europeans encountered and then subjugated other continents, French and above all British colonisers and their home audiences took the Athenian line. Cultural and physical differences became rungs on a moral ladder. Being ‘heathen’ and not Christian kept most strangers near the ladder’s foot. But the English added another rung: mockery. Wearing grass skirts, worshipping monkeys, eating missionaries, chanting woo-woo ‘animal noises’ or merely being Black? Hilarious! The returning traveller could always raise hearty laughs. Lewis, too, can make his readers laugh aloud. But ultimately not in superiority. By the time he died, in 2003, he had made himself one of the most empathetic and forceful warriors for the rights of Indigenous peoples. And in his writings about the tribes of the Amazon or Bolivia or Panama, Burma or Irian Jaya, there is no trace of Orientalist condescension.

Lewis’s friend John Hatt, who selected and introduces these articles, hasn’t set them in chronological order. But they carry their publication dates, starting in the early 1950s. And the dates show a progression, from presenting ‘un-English’ behaviour as essentially bizarre or laughable to the full-face seriousness and empathy of his later writings about Balearic fishermen or Indigenous populations in Amazonia. The book’s title piece, ‘A Quiet Evening in Huehuetenango’, was written in 1956, ten years after Lewis had visited the hard-drinking settlement in Guatemala. A deafening festival takes place, with fireworks, ‘hotsdoogs’, marimba music and gallons of fiery ‘aguardiente’ spirits, until ‘three of the toughest-looking desperadoes I had ever seen’, with ‘machetes as big as naval cutlasses in their belts’, enter the bar where Lewis is drinking and advance on the jukebox. ‘Forgive me for addressing you, sir, but are you familiar with the method of manipulating the machine over there?’ And so on. The piece is enormous fun to read, spangled with merry adjectives and adverbs. But Lewis hasn’t yet escaped a familiar category: English explorer-tales shaped to make a reader laugh and shudder at ‘native’ othernesses out there.

His life, or lives, in Mediterranean Europe would change that. The 1950s were Lewis’s most intense decade of travel. But as Evans puts it, ‘the far peregrinations of the decade – Vietnam and Laos, Burma and India, Mexico, Guatemala, Algeria, equatorial Africa, Cuba’ – were underlaid by his long writing holidays, with family, on the Spanish coast. At Tossa de Mar and then on Ibiza, both ancient places still only on the brink of the tourist inrush, two things happened to him. One was his utter absorption in the lives of local fishermen, their families and communities and their methods: ‘archaic modes of fishing, which were always graceful and unhurried, and not very productive’. This, with many anecdotes and marvellous descriptive passages, forms part of the long ‘Letter from Ibiza’ (1956), which goes with the brief, masterly ‘Assassination in Ibiza’ (1959). The second of these ‘Mediterranean’ changes affected his writing. That ‘explorer prose’, with its whiff of amused condescension, drops away and Lewis’s mature style begins to appear: spare and alert, often witty but always serious in its respect and empathy for ‘the other’. Examples of this new austerity come in several articles about Spanish bullfighting – that arena where so many 20th-century writers lost their heads. Lewis takes no interest in gory symbolisms. Instead, in ‘Bullfighting’ and ‘Among the Bulls’, he achieves fascinating reporting into how the corrida industry operated behind the scenes. In one article here (such sheer prowess as a journalist!) Lewis witnesses the way young cows are tested for their fury and courage before being selected as fit mothers for fighting bulls. ‘A small black cow came tearing out into the ring, slid to a standstill and swung its head from side to side in search of an adversary. It was big-horned, narrow of rump, all bone and muscle; faster in the take-off than a bull, quicker on the turn and with sharper horns. “Ugly customer,” a herdsman whispered approvingly in my ear.’

After Spain, the focus of his writing shifted to southern Italy, with a constellation of pieces about Sicily, Sardinia and Abruzzo. Here, he is using his talent for seeming inconspicuous and harmless to make people talk. They tell him tragic and lurid anecdotes. But they also speak about poverty and injustice and, above all, about endemic rural violence: the murders, the vendettas reaching down generations, the codes of vengeance. The Mafia are urban-based and established; the bandits usually no more than fugitive losers and victims, sometimes hired by the Mafiosi and sometimes exterminated by them if they become a threat to social order. Lewis had encountered that sort of order in the war, when power in Naples was divided between the Camorra and the famous New York mobster Vito Genovese, installed by the Americans. He is describing Sicily and Sardinia as they were more than fifty years ago, and much – though far from everything – has changed.

But it would be wrong to think that his interest in organised crime in traditional societies was voyeuristic. This anthology shows something else, more important, which recurs in most of these pieces: Lewis was fascinated by lawlessness. That did not mean that he was attracted by sheer chaos, or even by the glamour of the solitary outlaw. It was the ability of oppressed or shattered communities to reconstruct an unofficial order for themselves that moved him. In ‘Return to Naples’ (1980), he rediscovers the city’s genius for survival by regulating what the authorities agree not to notice, or – for instance – by turning police challenges to Camorra smugglers into a harmless game. Everything si arrangia – can be fixed. Like Lewis, I have enjoyed the Naples seafront show as the fleet of police launches roars out towards the incoming boats of the cigarette smugglers, but – after tracing graceful arcs of foam – somehow never actually stops or boards them. In the mountain villages of Sicily or Sardinia, Lewis works out the complex rules and codes which are supposed to give lethal family vendettas at least a pattern, a predictability. In ‘The Bandits of Orgosolo’, he dissects in detail an awful episode when the ‘lawless laws’ failed to operate. This was the 1962 murder of the Townleys, a nice, middle-aged British couple who went into the Sardinian hills looking for a place to build a retirement cottage. The killing devastated Orgosolo because it was completely beyond the rules and because – at first – nobody knew who had done it or why: not a robbery, not a botched ransom kidnap or honour shooting. A local commented to Lewis: ‘All Sardinia turned its back on us.’ He went on: ‘Understand me, a man gets killed for some reason, and then his relations get together to even the score. That’s the custom. But this thing didn’t have any meaning … We are not criminals. We are an oppressed people.’

Lewis sees his point. Much of this long and dramatic article is an account of Sardinian history, the terrible pauperisation of its rural people and the ‘feudal’ inequality (as it was fifty years ago) between the income of a peasant on an estate and an ex-peasant waiter earning ten times as much in one of the new holiday hotels. In Sicily, Lewis visits the town of Corleone in what was once ‘bandit country’ (until the Mafia wiped out most of the bandits after the Second World War). Elsewhere, in ‘grim industrial suburbs’, he finds another lawless order but this one is in decay. The enforcers are split. ‘Chaos – the word is hardly ever out of Sicilian mouths – reigns in places … subjected to a divided Mafia, engaged continually in mutual slaughter over the division of the spoils.’ (The same collapse of criminal discipline would descend on Marseille a generation later when the traditional Corsican crime bosses, who had maintained calm through si arrangia understandings with the authorities, were suddenly arrested. The drug trade was grabbed by rival gangs of teenagers wielding Kalashnikovs, and violence flooded the city.)

The same recognition of unwritten rules, of the basic human talent for constructing a protective web of restraints and customs, runs through Lewis’s writing about Indigenous peoples. His great polemics about the genocide of the original peoples of the Amazon basin and Bolivia are his most solid legacy: they appalled the world and led – are still leading – to slow change. But his starting point is demonstrating that these peoples of the forest have long evolved their own social structures, guiding the way they live and survive, and even the way they can adapt to modernity if they are left to themselves. Against them are the intruding forces of capitalist greed, the land hunger of the poor and the cultural ‘ethnocide’ assisted by evangelical Christian missions. Lewis’s 1969 article ‘Genocide’ was 12,000 words long, the biggest item the Sunday Times magazine had ever published. The impulse for it was the exposure of the fact that the Indian Protection Service in Brazil had for years been acting as the main agency for the mass murder, ethnic cleansing and effective enslavement of Indigenous peoples. Lewis travelled about the region in his discreet way, documenting the atrocities and setting them in the context of the five centuries during which the population reduced from about three million at the time of European ‘contact’ to perhaps 300,000 still in their forest territory at the end of the 20th century. Among its impacts, ‘Genocide’ led almost instantly to the founding of Survival International, the campaign which fights for the interests of tribal peoples.

In​ 1974, Lewis travelled through Paraguay with his photographer and friend Don McCullin to investigate the fate of the Aché people, decimated by professional ‘Indian hunters’ and now being lured and kidnapped out of their last forest retreats. ‘Manhunt’ is much more of a personal journal than ‘Genocide’, recording their travels over liquefying mud roads in search of the camp where forest Indians were being dumped. At Caacayí, ‘named after the call of a bird’, Lewis’s descriptive gift goes over the top. ‘In this area all the Arcadian charm, the style and the swagger of South America had survived unscathed … Diurnal bats fluttered from the windows of great sepulchral mansions emptied by so many wars and revolutions. Aloof horsemen went thudding past under their wide hats, a palm always upraised in greeting.’ But it was here, when he finally reached the camp, that Lewis developed his dislike of missionaries. Above all, he mistrusted the powerful American evangelical sects such as the New Tribes Mission or the evasively named Summer Institute of Linguistics (which supported the Bolivian government’s plan to ‘cleanse’ a vast area of its Indigenous inhabitants and replace them with white settlers fleeing South Africa or Rhodesia). In ‘The Tribe That Crucified Christ’, Lewis reports that in Venezuela the New Tribes Mission had used the appearance of a comet to announce the end of the world to the Ye’cuana tribe, giving them ‘three days, on pain of suffering a fiery extinction, to break with their wicked past’. Back in Paraguay, Lewis and McCullin reached the reservation camp to find only a few Aché, sick or starving, lying around in terminal squalor. The missionary there, who hired them out to local farmers, hadn’t bothered to learn their language: his creed told him that they would burn in hell anyway. In 1988, Lewis published The Missionaries, a book whose sometimes overdone fury was related to his own dogged romanticism about Indigenous ways of life. He never really faced the idea that adaptation to modern society was not only inevitable but – if managed by tribal people in their own time and without outside violence – might not annihilate their communities.

There are 36 articles and essays in A Quiet Evening. All are gripping, in different ways. They display a novelist’s developing delight with words and images, which – at Lewis’s later best – is trained back into a spare elegance that needs no decoration. The travels come from all over the world: not only South America or Mediterranean Europe, but California (the labour struggles of the grape pickers), Liberia, Ghana, Belize (still sleepy British Honduras when he visited), Burma and Siam, Papua, Panama, Cuba. Some pieces record failure, like his ‘interview’ with Hemingway in Cuba in which a drink-sodden, touchy old man ‘talked in a desultory and spiritless fashion’. A few raise bleak questions. In ‘The Cossacks Go Home’, Lewis recalls his time commanding a guarded shipload of prisoners, men from Soviet Central Asia who had been captured by the Germans and agreed to serve under them in the Italian campaign. They seem to have had no illusions about what would happen to them when they were handed over to the Soviet authorities. Though Lewis doesn’t say so, his voyage was an outlier of the great ‘return of the Cossacks’ scandal, so bitterly disputed after the war, when British troops in Austria forcibly returned thousands of anti-communist Russian and Ukrainian men and women to the Soviet security police. How much Lewis really knew, and what he felt about his own role, is less than clear.

It is hard to choose a favourite item. Lewis’s affectionate irony, his sense of the inherent looniness of the contrast between rich and poor, comes out in his story about a group of Choco people in the Panama jungle. They go about their lives naked or nearly naked, to the delight of tourist boatloads with cameras. So when a boat is heard approaching, they dash madly to get dressed – in order to charge the trippers four dollars to undress again. And no story about the constant Lewis theme of absurd but noble human dignity in the midst of disaster shows it better than ‘Rangoon Express’. This reconstructs a postwar train journey through a Burma where everything possible has broken down: who knows whether it is Red or White Flag or Karen guerrillas who keep blowing up the rails behind and before them? And yet something is still working: the serenity and resourcefulness of passengers and crew. A Buddhist monk fills the long wait with a discourse on how King Mindon was previously incarnated as a female demon. Next, there is a discussion about astrological failures.

Meanwhile another small mine explodes on the track.

Retiring to the lavatory, the senior [rail] inspector reappeared dressed in his best silk longyi, determined, it seemed, to confront with proper dignity any emergency that might arise … We were stranded in a dead-flat sun-wasted landscape. The paddies held a few yellow pools through which black-necked storks waded with premeditation, while buffaloes emerged from their hidden wallows, as if seen at the moment of creation.

Each story in this book is like a wonderful destination, which you leave longing only to return.