Norman Lewis, RIP
The masterful British travel writer, Norman Lewis, has died. It was his eye for the beautiful and the grotesque, combined with his understated style that made his work so distinctive. To experience Lewis at his best, read Naples '44, his diary of a year spent in the city at the end of the Second World War. Last week, we featured an entry from it here in our "Diarist of the Day slot:
24 July 1944: "Last week a nobleman in our street was lifted by his servants from his deathbed, dressed in his evening clothes, then carried to be propped up at the head of the staircase over the courtyard of his palazzo. Here with a bouquet of rose thrust into his arms he stood for a moment to take leave of his friends and neighbours gathered in the courtyard below, before being carried back to receive the last rites. Where else but in Naples could a sense of occasion be carried to such lengths?"
The Guardian obituary, entitled "Deeply private writer whose civilised prose bore witness to the world's atrocities and follies", was written by Julian Evans. Here's an excerpt:
"Reviewers eager for a lazy comparison mentioned him in the same breath as Graham Greene; and Greene himself had 'no hesitation in calling him one of the best writers, not of any particular decade, but of our century'. And to re-read any of Lewis's accounts of travel — to Indo-China and India, to Burma, Latin America, Spain, Sicily or Indonesia — is to fall instantly under the spell of his subtle, refulgent musical magic."
In the Financial Times, James Owen, who is currently organizing an exhibition of 20th-century British travel writers at London's National Portrait Gallery, said:
"My devotion to him was born of reading his masterpiece Naples '44. For me, it ranks among the best five travel books of the last century, and I must have given away a score or more copies in an attempt to win new converts to an author who never seemed to enjoy the cachet of, say, Patrick Leigh Fermor or Bruce Chatwin. "
For Owen, it was in Naples that Lewis turned his craft into an art:
"Few places could have had a more perceptive chronicler of its charms and oddities: the liberating Allies were feted — and fed — by the starving Neapolitans with a dish of manatee from the aquarium. Only one travel writer arguably could have described a young Neapolitan woman thus: 'She had the innocence of expression that completes the armament of any outstanding harlot.' "
Norman Lewis was born on 28 June 1908 and died on 22 July this year, aged 95.
Diarist of the day: Franz Kafka, 2 August 1914"Germany has declared war on Russia. — Swimming in the afternoon."
