Travels with Norman Lewis

Norman Lewis, who died in 2003 at the age of 95, was one of the twentieth century’s most adventurous travellers and one of its most brilliant and compelling writers. He was also prolific, producing fifteen novels, twenty highly praised travel books and hundreds of influential newspaper articles.

So why isn’t he better-known today? The Slightly Foxed team put this question to Julian Evans, a distinguished writer and traveller himself, author most recently of Undefeatable: Odessa in Love and War, and of Semi Invisible Man, the definitive biography of Norman Lewis.

Julian took his title directly from his subject, who described himself as a ‘semi-invisible man’, a watcher from the sidelines who hated personal publicity. It was a lesson Norman learned from a hard childhood in which, as a clever boy growing up in the North London suburbs, he was severely bullied at school. His spiritualist parents, shattered by the deaths of his two older brothers, sent him to stay for some time with his Welsh grandfather and three disturbingly eccentric aunts, an interlude he described in his autobiography Jackdaw Cake.

A sharp dresser with a taste for fast cars, motor bikes and guns (though he hated violence) and a man of great charm, Norman survived during the 1930s Depression by running his own successful camera business. But travelling and writing were his passions, and after wartime service as an army Intelligence officer which produced his masterpiece Naples ’44, he wove the experiences of his worldwide travels into many other magical books such as A Dragon Apparent, Golden Earth and Voices of the Old Sea. He had an unerring instinct for a story and took risks to give a voice to overlooked communities. His Sunday Times article on the genocide of indigenous tribes in Brazil prompted the founding of Survival International, and The Honoured Society exposed the inner workings of the Mafia in Sicily.

Courage, humour, humanity, a distinctive voice and a genius for storytelling – Lewis has them all. ‘One goes on reading page after page as if eating cherries,’ wrote one New York Times reviewer. An essential author, we all agreed, for anyone who relishes good writing.

The Slightly Foxed Editors’ book recommendations were two novels by Joseph O’Connor, My Father’s House and The Ghosts of Rome, and Justin Webb’s childhood memoir The Gift of a Radio. And for an introduction to Norman Lewis, A Quiet Evening, a selection of his best articles introduced by John Hatt.

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Show Notes

Books Mentioned

Please find links to books, articles, and further reading listed below. We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles mentioned on the podcast and listed below. Please get in touch with the Slightly Foxed office for more information. The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: minutes; seconds)

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Eric Lomax, The Railway Man (1:03)

Arthur Ransome, Peter Duck (1:45)

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1:59)

Jacqueline Susann, Valley of the Dolls (2:06)

John T. Appleby, Suffolk Summer (2:23)

Norman Lewis, A Quiet Evening (5:17)

Julian Evans, Undefeatable: Odessa in Love and War (5:58)

Norman Lewis, A Suitable Case for Corruption (11:50)

Norman Lewis, Naples ’44 (11:53)

Norman Lewis, Spanish Adventure (25:32)

Norman Lewis, A Voyage by Dhow (26:21)

Norman Lewis, ‘Hemingway in Havana’, A Quiet Evening (29:51)

Norman Lewis, A Dragon Apparent (36:11)

Norman Lewis, The Voices of the Old Sea (49:04)

Joseph O’Connor, My Father’s House (52:25)

Joseph O’Connor, The Ghosts of Rome (52:30)

Justin Webb, The Gift of a Radio (54:06)

Julian Evans, Semi-Invisible Man

Related Slightly Foxed Articles

–Championing the Underdog, Justin Marozzi on Norman Lewis, Naples ’44, Issue 38

–The Semi-Invisible Man, Justin Marozzi on Norman Lewis, A Dragon Apparent & Golden Earth, Issue 46

–A Tale of Two Villages, William Palmer on Norman Lewis, Voices of the Old Sea, Issue 74

–After the Death of the Masters, Barnaby Rogerson on travel writing, Issue 6

  • Championing the Underdog
    1 June 2013

    Championing the Underdog

    From Herodotus’ and Thucydides’ time the war book has been with us as an ever-present literary companion to the massacres on the battlefield. I took Norman Lewis’s Naples ’44 to Iraq with me in 2004 and found its humanity and honesty instantly compelling. Graham Greene considered Lewis ‘one of our best writers, not of any particular decade but of our century’, and during the darker days in Iraq it was strangely comforting to realize that there is little new in conflict. From ‘friendly fire’ and war profiteers to prostitution and petty bureaucracy, it has all been seen before.
    Read more
  • The Semi-invisible Man
    1 June 2015

    The Semi-invisible Man

    Published in 1952, Golden Earth remains one of the most timeless guides to Burma. It is classic Lewis, crammed with incident, humour, observation and detail. There is no mistaking the poise of his prose (Luigi Barzini likened reading it to ‘eating cherries’), nor the empathy that characterizes his dealings with everyone he meets, from monks and policemen to businessmen and lorry drivers. Both Golden Earth and its immediate predecessor, A Dragon Apparent (1951), based on his travels in Indochina, are much more than very fine examples of twentieth-century travel literature. This is profoundly civilized writing in defence of ancient civilizations under imminent threat.
    Read more
  • After the Death of the Masters
    1 June 2005

    After the Death of the Masters

    Last summer the two masters of travel writing, Norman Lewis and Wilfrid Thesiger, died within a month of each other. As Britain buried the last of her explorers and the best of her travel writers, it became clear that a literary threshold had been crossed. The obituaries were unanimous in their praise of these great men, a pair of triumphant individualists who were born with a zeal to record a vanishing world.
    Read more
  • A Tale of Two Villages
    1 June 2022

    A Tale of Two Villages

    For many people in the countryside, life just after the Second World War had not changed so very much from a hundred years before. When I was a young boy in the 1950s our family lived in a small farmhouse in mid-Wales, a couple of miles from the nearest village. We had no mains water or electricity; water came from a well through a hand pump in the kitchen; electricity was provided by a generator – when that burned out one night in November we relied on candles and oil lamps for the whole winter. There was no bathroom, only a tin bath hung on the kitchen door, and an outside privy. Neighbouring farms were much the same, and families scratched a living from the sheep dotted on the surrounding hills. The children spoke Welsh and English and sang Welsh songs on the school bus. Most people went to Chapel on Sunday. It all seemed perfectly normal and likely to last forever.
    Read more

Other Links

–The Barnsbury Book Festival

–Slightly Foxed Writers’ Competition

–Eland Books

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No. 3 in E Major by Bach

Hosted by Rosie Goldsmith
Produced by Philippa Goodrich


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