Whispers of Wanderlust: Revisiting Norman Lewis’s Enduring Travel Stories

The travel narratives of Norman Lewis, which are highly praised for their remarkable polish, were composed by him in an intricate longhand. The author of recognized accounts detailing the Sicilian mafia and the exploitation of Indigenous tribes in South America, he would jot down his revisions on new scraps of paper, and, with assistance from his spouse Lesley, affixed them over previous drafts until his manuscript crackled like parchment. I witnessed this method firsthand when I interviewed the author, who was then in his 90s. We were at his residence, an ancient rectory in the heart of Essex surrounded by a wild garden that grew as tall as an elephant’s eye. Here, he recuperated between escapades in a state of “introspective, almost monastic calm,” or so the blurb on his book covers implausibly suggested. Tall and moustached, he had been an early enthusiast of zoot suits, a skilled marksman, and a passionate yet reckless racer of Bugattis. His life encompassed strenuous endeavors and covert operations in Cuba for MI6 and the CIA. Lewis passed away in 2003. Now many of his finest articles are being compiled in this collection for the first time in a hardcover edition, a title as distinctive from its author as his assertions of monk-like reflection.

By the time I encountered Lewis, he was relishing a well-deserved golden period. His backlist had been revived owing to his tireless publisher, Eland, whose red-and-cream branding has become a hallmark of quality writing. At this point in his career, it wasn’t solely Lewis’s glue-stiffened multiple sclerosis that resembled a palimpsest. He was revisiting memories from long ago, layering them with the sheen of hindsight. “He began to consider the past as his literary subject,” as per the writer Julian Evans, who released a biography of Lewis five years posthumously. One of his most significant works, Naples ’44, which recounted his experiences as an allied intelligence officer amidst the beleaguered Neapolitans, took the form of a diary, but Evans noted that Lewis had maintained no journal at that time and made only a few notes. The completed text, according to Evans, was an “invented diary… scored and colored by its detached and sensitive remaking”. These disclosures posed risks to Lewis’s reputation. My opinion, if it holds any weight, is that his later works resemble a great artist’s prints, skillfully developed pieces produced from plates etched many years prior.

John Hatt, the founder of Eland, conceived the brilliant idea of assembling this compilation of Lewis’s vividly detailed reportage. In reality, the quiet evening referred to in the title was anything but serene. Lewis was situated in a bar in Guatemala when three individuals wielding machetes (“as enormous as naval cutlasses”) burst in: “smugglers and gunmen, if pressed, prepared to hack each other – or the solitary traveler – into pieces for a few dollars, yet possessing a remarkable, almost lethal punctiliousness concerning matters of social interaction”. The rogues were captivated by the novelty of a jukebox in the cantina, and the leader, offering Lewis a formal bow, requested: “Should you manage to prompt the machine to play Mortal Sin for us, we would be most grateful.”

It may be a touch premature in the year to be awarding accolades, but I doubt there will be a finer volume of nonfiction than this in 2025. Among its contents is an encounter in Havana with Ernest Hemingway, who was then the most lauded author globally. Lewis was taken aback to see “exhaustion and emptiness” on that often-reproduced visage.

Graham Greene, an accomplished travel writer himself and a fervent admirer of Lewis, enjoyed quoting the poet Robert Browning: “Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer…” Similarly, Lewis populated his landscapes with intriguingly paradoxical characters: the impoverished aristocrat, the meticulous mafioso, the IT expert with a passion for snake charming. He returned with accounts of European regions that do not appear in any gazetteer. In Lewis’s narrative, these “straw-colored” and desolate outlands, frequented solely by shepherds and assailants, were Brigadoons of steadfast tradition and sorrowful chivalry.

If he reflected on days gone by, so, too, does this collection: to the day prior to yesterday, a time now wholly irretrievable, when editors of newspapers and magazines assigned writers like Lewis to create long-form journalism. Though no one termed it as such back then, since it had yet to occur to anyone that its length was extraordinary. Today, no successor to Lewis could thrive on journalistic assignments. With a few notable exceptions, the weary writer has vanished, like the milkman and the bus conductor, into an unknown realm, that undiscovered territory from which no travel writer returns.