Norman Lewis (2) (1908–2003)

It would be impossible to publish Naples diaries of Norman Lewis right after the war. The world was busy glorifying and romanticizing the great allied victory, creating myths and heroes of the modern age, thus paving the way for new wars to come.

Lewis takes a different point of view. For him, the war effort, the involvement of the allied armies is a necessary evil. It is necessary but it is evil nevertheless. The actual war events take second stage, are mentioned in passing if mentioned at show more all; the focus is on people, on individual and collective tragedies, on hunger, on humiliation, on senseless loss of lives.

It is not surprising that the book was eventually published in 1978 after another prolonged military conflict has changed the perception of war in public consciousness.

Frankly pacifist attitude of the author, who does not fire a single shot during his military service in Italy, is interesting but not unique. What makes this book special is the style of writing: laconic, subdued, detached. Almost matter-of-fact descriptions of truly terrifying scenes make them stand out even more, creating a cinematic effect. Here are two examples:

"A number of buildings including a bank had been pulverized by a terrific explosion that had clearly just taken place. Bodies were scattered all over the street, but here and there among them stood the living as motionless as statues, and all coated in thick white dust... the silence was total."

"In Pizzo-Falcone a team of roadsweepers were working by lamplight clearing up what looked like a lake of spilled stew where a crowded shelter had received a direct hit."

The format of the diary that initially elevates this book later becomes its most significant drawback. As life slowly normalizes in the South of Italy in 1944, the narration downshifts from strongly disturbing and horrifying events into a series of anecdotes and observations about local customs, stories of love, deception, beliefs, and curiosities. These anecdotes are told with humor and compassion, they are not at all judgmental. Still, the intensity is lower. The book starts with a bang and ends with somewhat of a whimper.

I must share one more quote that does come towards the end of the book. It touches on a point that can be almost identically applied to our times and our newest wars:

"... in their hearts, these people must be thoroughly sick and tired of us. A year ago we liberated them from the Fascist Monster, and they still sit doing their best to smile politely at us, as hungry as ever, more disease-ridden than ever before, in the ruins of their beautiful city where law and order have ceased to exist. And what is the prize that is to be eventually won? The rebirth of democracy. The glorious prospect of being able one day to choose their rulers from a list of powerful men, most of whose corruptions are generally known and accepted with weary resignation. The days of Benito Mussolini must seem like a lost paradise compared with this."

I am looking forward to many more silent conversations with Norman Lewis in various places around the world covered in his books.

Liam, my friend, thank you for this gift! show less

A diary by a British officer seconded to the Americans, detailing horrifying injustices, crimes and even atrocities perpetrated by the Americans, British, and Canadians (the Canadians in his area were a small group of usually drunken cowboys from Saskatchewan, apparently, who went in for crimes more than atrocities and didn't have the power to do injustices). In Ronciglione, north of Rome, they have the walls of a church destroyed by American bombs preserved as a memorial site and parents show more (whose own grandparents were children at the time the bombs fell) take their children to play there and tell them -- and random foreign visitors like me -- "They bombed us when we were their allies, for no reason; there was no military target anywhere near us". Naples and Sorrento have a lot more to complain about. I wonder what memories were passed on by the few survivors from the various small cities in the region which were utterly reduced to rubble by American carpet bombing at the instigation of a paranoid general who ordered bombing runs every time he heard another unreliable rumour. show less

This is an interesting account written by Norman Lewis, a former British Intelligence officer, of the several months that he spent in southern Italy in the immediate aftermath of the Allied invasion. Lewis has a good eye for the dissonant and the dramatic, the small details that tell a bigger story: dead cattle lying, their rigid legs in the air, in front of Classical temples; weeping blind orphan girls, drawn into a restaurant by hunger, and ignored by the diners all around them.

Yet I’m show more quite sure that there are times when Lewis was exaggerating or inventing in the interests of greater drama. Were there villages around Naples—“medieval” places where the inhabitants had “Neolithic faces”—where women were still forced to submit to droit de seigneur, as the author claims? Well, no: droit de seigneur is a myth with no basis in historical fact. And while Lewis does at times express empathy towards the women and girls who were sexually assaulted or forced into sex work because of the war, there’s an “oh she was lying about it being rape” story and at least one moment when he says that peasant women are just used to rape, which is such absolute bullshit. I never warmed to Lewis as a result, and while this had interest for me as a historical piece, it didn’t grab me in the way it seems to have done for others. show less

Certainly my favourite of the three Norman Lewis books I've read so far, this covers three consecutive summers in the years post-WWII spent in a pseudonymous fishing village on the Costa Brava, and the effacement within that period of the traditional way of life by easy tourist money. Lewis gradually gets himself accepted by the villagers, joins them on fishing expeditions with line, net, and spear, and writes with his usual effortless grace, precision, and humour of the place and its show more people.

The cultural oddities of Farol, and its impoverished inland neighbour village of Sort, seem inexhaustible. Farol in general, and its fishermen in particular, are vehemently irreligious, refusing to enter the church or to admit the priest to their houses, their bar, or their boats. Leather shoes are absolutely taboo. In the evenings in the bar, the fishermen recount their days at sea (in Castilian, not their habitual Catalan) in extemporised epic coplas which, as reported by Lewis, are of a very high standard. The itinerant wise man/healer/curandero is relied upon not just for medical aid but for dispute resolution and life advice in general, which he accomplishes with astrology, tarot-readings and a folk-pharmacopeia. The local decayed gentleman retains a quasi-feudal relationship with a few peon families who work his land in return for bread and beans. The poverty is as extreme as the quirkiness, exacerbated by subpar sardine harvests and the decimation of the cork plantations, sole resource of Sort, by disease. Marriages are on hold, sex is only allowed at siesta time, and the curandero's marinated sea-sponge contraceptives are in high demand in an effort to limit the number of mouths to feed.

The book turns at the halfway point, when a local black-marketeer on the make moves in and starts splashing the cash to fit Farol out for the nascent package tourism industry.

The sheer eccentricity of Farol and its characters made for a somewhat bumpy ride despite my well-tuned suspension of disbelief. This, combined with the fact that Lewis wrote the book from notes, three decades after the events in it, and the liberties that he's known to have taken (like actually being there with his wife and kid, not as a lone outsider as per the book) meant that I found it hard to shake the suspicion that he'd (a) made up a bunch of stuff and (b) telescoped the timeline of Farol's touristification. It's hard to credit that the near-total eradication of the old ways could have happened in just three years, but he was there and I wasn't, and anyway the moral of the story — that money is a quick-acting drug and the old ways don't die all that hard in the face of it — holds true. Probably best to think of this as fiction-non-fiction and not get hung up on authenticity. It's packed with character and plot, regardless, and ends on an exquisitely-pitched elegiac note that will soften the flintiest of hearts. show less